With no communication from the company, publishers relying on Facebook traffic are at the mercy of the inscrutable algorithm. Data shows an apparent change at Facebook in May caused website traffic to tank at some news sites.
TL,DR version… put too many eggs in their Facebook basket and are upset some got scrambled.
Publishers say they deserve transparency,
Publishers want transparency… why should they get transparency with what Facebook is doing, they’re no more special than everybody else who is at the whim of Meta.
“It’s difficult to say with certainty what the causes are, but Facebook has made no secret about its intention to deprioritize news on its platform and give greater precedence to video content,
So they were kind of warned since it’s not a secret and thus it shouldn’t have been a surprise.
“Our content has provided a lot of value to Facebook,
And yet, they discount that Facebook has provided a lot of value back to them because the article also says Publishers claim roughly 25% of their traffic comes from Facebook.
I’d hazard a guess it’s a test to see if they can dump news because of things like in Canada with their “Online News Act” and California’s “California Journalism Preservation Act” which does the same thing, making Facebook pay to pass the news on to users.
I’m not trying to make excuses for Facebook, they are a huge privacy nightmare that has far too many people hooked to them, but forcing them to pay for news is ridiculous when you consider they aren’t just taking those companies’ news and posting it, those sites and owners have Facebook share buttons they installed on their websites themselves.
