Facebook traffic to news publishers has plummeted 50pc this year
Web traffic from Facebook to Australian publishers has collapsed by upwards of 50 per cent since the start of this year, as the Meta-owned platform escalates its pivot away from news. This is despite it having months left in its multi-million dollar deals with media outlets.
Figures compiled for internal use by several local publishers and data from analytics platform SimilarWeb show a precipitous fall in the amount of traffic reaching news articles published locally from Facebook in the last nine months.
Facebook referrals to publishers in Australia have dropped by upwards of 50 per cent this year.
Combined referrals from social media platforms for four of Australia’s most popular news websites – news.com.au, nine.com.au, 7news.com.au and abc.net.au – show a fall from nearly 50 million to just over 20 million a month, according to SimilarWeb. Facebook referrals comprise the vast majority of that social traffic.
One mid-sized Australian news publisher, who requested anonymity, said its Facebook posts reached 1 million people a month at the beginning of the year. That dropped to under 500,000 by July.
Australian publishers are not alone. Data from The Social Media Index, which measures global traffic, shows Facebook has fallen to 6 per cent from 12 per cent as a source of referrals for content websites.
The move away from news content comes as all of Facebook’s deals under the News Media Bargaining Code – Australian legislation that compelled Facebook and Google to negotiate with publishers to pay for content – approach their expiry date.
The code facilitated more than $200 million in payments from Google and Facebook to news publishers for the use of their content. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, pulled news
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