"...Slate—yes, the publication you’re reading right now—got more than 85 million clicks that originated from external sites and apps in January 2017 alone. Almost a third of them—28 million—came from Facebook. That was more than any other single outside traffic source. Other online publications with a political focus, such as Vox and Politico, posted similarly blockbuster numbers.
"It was, in retrospect, the zenith of Facebook’s influence over the news industry. Starting in about 2013, when the social network began prioritizing actual news in users’ news feed rankings—the order in which posts appear when you scroll through its app or site—Facebook had grown increasingly critical to many media outlets’ business, for better or worse. Every visitor the social network sent to an outlet’s pages translated to much-needed ad views. And it sent so many that newsrooms remolded their editorial strategies to maximize clicks, likes, and shares on Facebook. For less scrupulous publishers, that sometimes meant sensationalizing headlines or framing stories in ways that pandered to people’s biases—a trend that Facebook tried to combat algorithmically, with limited success. By August 2016, the New York Times’ John Herrman wrote that Facebook had “centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way,” shaping how the public perceived politics by determining which stories they’d see in their feeds. And by 2017, some antitrust thinkers concerned with its centrality to the news business were calling for Facebook to be regulated as a monopoly."
"...For this story, Slate agreed to share with me its own data on referrals in order to provide a window into the rapidly changing relationship between Facebook and online publishers. The chart below shows how traffic to Slate from Facebook rose steadily through 2016 and peaked in January 2017, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of all outside traffic sources. From there it plunged, with steep drops in mid-2017, late 2017, and again in early 2018. From May 2017 to May 2018, traffic from Facebook dropped from nearly 19 million views to about 3.6 million—a decline of 81 percent. To put it another way: For every five people that Facebook used to send to Slate about a year ago, it now sends less than one. “Every time Facebook traffic would go down, we’d think, ‘OK, maybe this is the low point,’ ” said Slate’s editor in chief, Julia Turner. “And then it would go down even further.”...
"Turner declined to estimate the precise amount of advertising revenue Slate has lost as a result of the nosedive, though she acknowledged that “the drop in traffic does come with a financial hit.” A rough, back-of-envelope calculation using prevailing ad rates and ad loads (that is, the number of ads a reader sees when she visits a site) suggests that a loss of 15 million visits per month could mean something on the order of $1 million per year in revenue—which, in a newsroom, might equal a dozen or more journalists’ salaries. Slate laid off five editorial staffers in early 2017, but the company told me those were unrelated to Facebook traffic. It has not announced any staff cuts since.
"Several other online publishers that have laid off journalists in the past year cited lost Facebook traffic as a factor, though. Those include Vox Media (the parent of Vox.com, the Verge, Eater, SB Nation, and other sites), which laid off 50 employees in February. Vox said at the time that it was pulling back from its strategy of publishing content directly on Facebook, calling the social network “unreliable.” Sites that posted lots of video on Facebook, such as Vice, Mic, and Mashable, have been especially hard hit. Some publishers that were especially reliant on Facebook have gone out of business altogether. LittleThings, a purveyor of “feel-good” content targeting a female audience, shut down abruptly in February due to what it called a “catastrophic” 75 percent decline in Facebook referrals following the rankings change.
"...Facebook pitched its focus on trusted sources as a remedy to the problems of false and misleading news, implying the algorithm change would help legitimate publishers of credible information. But the algorithm is based on Facebook user survey results, and different users trust different news sources for very different reasons. Some trust mainstream news outlets such as the New York Times because they do original reporting and write in an objective style. Some trust opinionated TV personalities, such as those on Fox News or MSNBC, because they’re relatable and affirm familiar worldviews. Some trust magazines of opinion and analysis such as Slate or National Review, because their writers own up to their political biases, while others mistrust them for the same reason. Most familiar with the workings of the journalism industry would trust any of those outlets over hyperpartisan propaganda sites on the right and left that lack basic editorial standards such as correcting errors of fact. But it’s not clear that most Facebook users are tuned in to those distinctions—and they’re the ones whose opinions Facebook is relying on to separate credible from fake.
"The social network, for its part, has gone out of its way to avoid defining what it means to be credible, or revealing which publishers are benefiting. “We don’t share any specific publishers because the list of publishers that are trusted is dynamic, as we survey people every single week,” a Facebook official told me in a statement. However, the company added, “We know from our data internally that high quality news organizations are benefitting from the changes we’ve made this year.”"
"...Facebook’s retreat from that central role in online news has certainly been painful for many publishers—especially those that had made the social network a centerpiece of their strategies. Turner told me that Slate was able to weather the blow from Facebook better than some because it had avoided going “all in” on Facebook during the boom years. For instance, to diversify its revenue, the magazine launched a paid membership program called Slate Plus in 2014, which grew dramatically following Trump’s election, and its podcasts have grown to account for 25 percent of its revenue. Slate also continued to bring readers in through its front door even as industry watchers declared the homepage “dead.” Still, the loss of reliable Facebook traffic has undoubtedly affected Slate’s editorial and business strategies.
"One silver lining of the Facebook crash is the emergence of other platforms that have been directing more traffic to many sites in the past year, even as Facebook sends far less. Google, Apple News, Twitter, and Flipboard are all sending more readers to Slate than they used to, and the increase has happened over the same time period that Facebook traffic has dried up, Carey said. Other publications told me the same is true for them. Digiday noted in January that Boston.com received more readers from Apple News than from Facebook in December. However, publishers often get less revenue from an Apple News reader than from a Facebook referral, because Apple pockets part of the ad revenue. New York Media, parent of New York magazine, has broken traffic records in 2018 by shifting its focus from Facebook to Google and Apple News.
"...For years, the greatest fear of many online news publishers was that Facebook would someday turn off the traffic spigot, leaving them gasping for readers and ad revenue. For Slate and many others, that’s largely what has happened over the past 18 months. As a result, people have lost jobs and many publications have had to adjust their plans and expectations. But the industry has not been devastated—at least so far. An optimist might even say that it’s being rebuilt on a firmer foundation, although online journalism has always been a shaky business. “The internet is a completely different place every 18 months, and that’s been true since we launched in 1996,” Turner said. “We never expected the Facebook boom to last forever.”
"Facebook’s waning influence could help to reverse some of the trends that the social network stoked: pandering headlines, overt partisanship, filter bubbles. It has certainly already forced many publications to prioritize the loyalty of their existing readers over chasing the wider but more fickle audiences available on social platforms. The important questions now are what behaviors, crutches, and opportunities to sustain viable news operations the new terrain will encourage, and whether a single traffic behemoth will replace Facebook or an archipelago of them. The Facebook era is ending. We don’t know whose era we’ll live in next."
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