In six years, Facebook has gone from 30% to 7% in the weight of non-direct traffic to the media

Meta's progressive and unstoppable withdrawal from the news has new figures of context, provided by Chartbeat to PressGazette.

The real-time analytics company shows a 50% drop in traffic from Facebook only in the last 12 months for 792 media outlets that it has been analyzing since 2018. In those six years, from March to March, the page views data would have regressed from 1,300 to 561 million, 58%. And that explains why the percentage of total consumption derived from that platform has plummeted from 30% to 7% in the same period.

These numbers continue those that Chartbeat has previously published: in January it indicated that clicks from Facebook that went to the media were reduced by 48%, which represented an acceleration compared to the 40% that it had detected in the first semester of that year. Even more so if you take into account that in 2021 the same source spoke of a drop of 18% since May and in 2018, the starting year of the current comparison, Facebook's contribution was already on a downward trend.

The impact in Spain was certified by the 2023 edition of the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report, in which Facebook consolidated a 19-point drop in the percentage of citizens who used it for information in seven years. Its gradual withdrawal has been partly covered by the increasingly important use of messaging services such as Telegram or WhatsApp.

The downward trend of the largest source of social traffic in the industry is accompanied by the progressive collapse of searches, in the context of Google's algorithm changes and on the eve of its model based on generative artificial intelligence starting to work. generalized way. The combination of both factors is being felt in the advertising revenues of media outlets such as those belonging to the Australian and British legs of News Corp or the largest newspaper group in the United Kingdom, Reach. In the latter case, PressGazette recalls that a 15% drop in commercial turnover in 2023 was partly attributed to these movements.

The data is in line with the results of a survey carried out in October by the Reuters Institute of 302 media executives in which almost two thirds of those surveyed indicated their concern about the decline in clicks from Facebook and X. Elon Musk's platform is currently more interested in attracting independent creators and larger multimedia production that allows it to access the growing advertising budgets associated with social video and connected television.

https://dircomfidencial.com/medios/en-seis-anos-facebook-ha-pasado-del-30-al-7-en-el-peso-de-trafico-no-directo-a-medios-20240516-0403/