Facebook’s New Update Could Destroy Online Publishers

Facebook has always been trying to balance the satisfaction of their users and the profit that they get from their corporate customers, which is why they always make changes with their algorithm to reflect the pulse of the time. With their latest update, it seems that the users have become the main focus, ensuring that their news feeds contain mostly content from their actual friends. This is great for the users, but it could have devastating effects on online publishers.

As Fast Company put it, Facebook users were getting tired of seeing way too many depressing news articles on their newsfeeds and were missing out on a lot of updates by their friends and families. Users want to see more lighthearted and happy things like baby pictures, inspirational posts, and notifications about the direction the lives of their friends are going. This was clear from the feedback that the social network got from its users who were fed up with the constant splash of clickbait titles they have to contend with.

Speaking of which, the update also spells disaster for online publishers who get a huge chunk of their profit from Facebook. According to Parse.ly, publishers get over 39 percent of inbound traffic from Facebook, even surpassing Google’s referral numbers. A substantial portion of users get their news from Facebook, after all, which makes the fact that publishers are getting a lot of traffic referrals from the site not that much of a surprise.

As a result, the changes that the social network is implementing will significantly impact the amount of traffic that they get, which could destroy smaller publishers, according to Wired. Even ignoring the fact that this will affect the livelihoods of a lot of people in the online publishing business, users will also see a decline in the number of articles that they are getting from publishers that they like.