Explicit Algorithm Change facebook According to a growing list of publishers and data from social media management company Echobox, there was a sharp drop in traffic to news and media sites in May.

This shift is worrisome in an increasingly fragile digital news environment, where companies have no choice but to rely on the chief gatekeeper of social media. Publishers say they deserve transparency, but as with similar changes in the past, there has been no word from Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

In an address to Gizmodo, the producers said the change began in February and worsened over the following months. “There has been a significant downward trend and this platform is important to us because our audience is a disproportionately large portion of Facebook users. This is about 25% of our trafficsaid Robert Chappell, executive editor of Madison 365, a nonprofit news center that works with Wisconsin communities of color.You never know what will change. This makes planning for the future difficult.“

Companies fear falling

According to Echobox, which collects data from more than 2,000 publishers around the world, the number of clicks coming from Facebook has been declining for about a year, but in May 2023, that decline accelerated dramatically. Among Echobox customers, the share of traffic from Facebook has fallen by about 50% since last summer.

“It’s hard to say with certainty what the reasons are, but Facebook has made no secret of its intention to focus less on news on its platform and more on video content, which naturally results in less traffic per click.” said Antoine Amann, CEO of Echobox.It can be extremely difficult for publishers to rely on third-party platforms as performance and revenue are heavily impacted by algorithmic changes over which they have no control.“

An employee at a sports and cultural news site with millions of Facebook followers told Gizmodo:We noticed a steady decline between February and the end of February. At first we thought it was our fault and that we had made some kind of mistake, but over time, other editors in our field reported the same thing.“

The digital media industry’s reliance on Facebook, once known as a bountiful source of traffic, is widely documented and one-sided. In May, Meta threatened to completely block news links on Facebook and Instagram in California in response to a bill pending in the state legislature that would require technology platforms (both Google and Meta) to pay publishers for news content.

While Meta hasn’t completely blocked news in California, its platforms can suppress news content in more subtle ways. Whistleblowers claimed that Meta blocked not only the news, but the pages of Australia’s hospitals and fire departments in 2021 in response to a similar bill proposal. Meta denied this claim, stating that the blocked pages were an accidental mistake.

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Via: Gizmodo Source: Echobox

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