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Monika Bauerlein, CEO of Mother Jones, has had a front row seat for years to see how Facebook shakes up the media industry.
Bauerlein, who took over nine years ago, remembers the days when some five million users visited Mother Jones’ online page each month after finding articles posted on Facebook. That was in 2017.
But Facebook, now known as Meta, pulled out of the news business, a move that disrupted traffic for many publications (Mother Jones has noticed a 99% drop in Facebook referrals since its heyday) and has had disastrous consequences for some. In September, Meta announced that it would “frown” on its Facebook News Feed tab in European countries, adding the U. K. , France, and Germany, as part of “an ongoing effort to better align our investments with the products and facilities that other people value most. “
The move away from the news follows years of Facebook’s PR mistakes related to the company’s handling of misinformation and its decisions about when to cancel accounts and remove posts. Conservative politicians have long accused the company of operating with a liberal bias, while teams on the other hand have portrayed Facebook as a key tool in Donald Trump’s election in 2016 because of the way Russian operatives exploited it to publicize his candidacy.
“At this point, it’s pretty clear from the feedback from Facebook and Meta executives that they’ve understood that data is more problematic than its value and that they’re only going to show other people a minimal amount of it. Bauerlein said in a statement.
At Mother Jones, a 48-year-old nonprofit magazine specializing in politics and research, the implications have been dramatic. Although Facebook generated millions of referrals consistent with Mother Jones month at its peak, in November and December it generated just over 58,000. and 67,000 visitors for Mother Jones, respectively, compared to around 172,000 and 228,000 in the same months a year earlier.
An investigation of 1,930 news and outlets from more than 370 corporations conducted through analytics firm Chartbeat for CNBC found that Facebook accounted for 33% of those publishers’ overall social traffic, measured through page views, in December, compared to 50% annually. earlier.
As to all external traffic, which comes from social media and search engines such as Google, Facebook represented 6% of referral volume in December 2023, down from 14% in December 2018 and 12% in December 2022. That decline is mostly due to Facebook, as Google accounted for 38% of external traffic in December, up from 26% five years earlier and 36% in 2022.
Jill Nicholson, chief marketing officer at Chartbeat, said the decline in Facebook’s social traffic was due to several measures taken through Meta, adding that last year Canadian users were banned from sharing their apps after the Canadian federal government passed the Online Information Act, which forced tech corporations to pay for national media content.
Nicholson said a similar ban imposed through Meta in Australia in 2021 ended up “making data less accessible” overall. Facebook reversed this resolution after reaching an agreement with the Australian government.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shows little interest in addressing the hot-button topics of politics and global affairs after taking trips to the Capitol after the 2016 election. Since converting his company’s call to Meta in late 2021, Zuckerberg has focused on making an investment. billions of dollars per quarter to expand the futuristic metaverse as it seeks to fend off TikTok by bolstering Reels, Meta’s short-form video product used by creators.
Meta shares closed at an all-time high on Friday, following a nearly 200% rally last year.
David Carr, senior insights manager at analytics firm Similarweb, said Meta’s changing approach to news isn’t all about Zuckerberg’s preferences. Users are also tired of all the online bickering.
“One of the things that Facebook has talked about as justification or explanation for why they’re making safe adjustments is that other people are happier with the service when they don’t see all that political stuff,” Carr said.
A Meta spokesperson, echoing previous statements from company executives, said the shift away from news has been driven by user behavior.
“We know that other people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content, but to engage with other people and notice new opportunities, passions and interests,” the spokesperson said. “We’ve made several adjustments to better align our investments with the products that other people value more. “
By downplaying the news, Meta didn’t just downplay debatable political debates. It’s harder for posts of all types and sizes to deliver stories to Facebook’s 3 billion monthly users.
Data from Similarweb shows that the 100 most sensible global news publishers saw Facebook’s search engine optimization traffic fall in 2023 compared to 2022, after a steady decline for several years.
Facebook accounted for 2. 7% of the Daily Mail’s global search engine optimization traffic in November 2023, up from 6. 5% in November 2020 and 3. 8% in November 2022, according to Similarweb. For The Independent, Facebook’s contribution fell to 1. 3% of traffic in November. up from 6. 5% three years ago and 4% in 2022.
Posts had to adapt and find other tactics to drive traffic. For some advertising sites that needed Facebook’s big numbers to make money, existential replacement.
BuzzFeed, once known for its viral posts and videos, shut down its BuzzFeed News site in April. The company still owns the news site HuffPost, but its main site largely comprises entertainment content, quizzes, and videos.
The company has a market capitalization of less than $35 million, nine years after NBCUniversal, owned by CNBC’s parent company Comcast, invested at a valuation of $1. 5 billion. BuzzFeed’s estimated Facebook search engine optimization traffic was 12% in November 2023, up from 15%. % a year earlier, according to Similarweb.
Vice Media, valued at $5. 7 billion in 2017, filed in May.
Some major media brands have noticed a further decline in traffic on Facebook in recent years as they have identified a desire to diversify their distribution sources over time. Across the media industry, news organizations are moving away from Facebook.
Sam Cholke, head of expansion and distribution at the Institute for Nonprofit News, cited the Texas Tribune and the Montana Free Press as examples of publications that are taking other routes to locate readers. The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit online newspaper launched in 2009, seizes people-opportunities to attract readers, while the Montana Free Press, introduced in 2016 through journalist John S. Adams, puts up billboards in the capital, Helena.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told analysts on his company’s earnings conference call in August that he was “laser-focused” on a new strategy that involves using synthetic intelligence to help generate content in addition to relying more on creators.
“As Facebook and major tech platforms continue to prioritize vertical video, traffic references from those platforms to our content have decreased,” Peretti said on the call.
Jessica Probus, an editor at BuzzFeed, told CNBC in an interview that BuzzFeed’s “biggest shift” in its audience strategy and Facebook came around 2021. Although there has been a “slow descent for a long time,” the main “tipping point,” she said, happened when Meta managed to reach TikTok more directly.
BuzzFeed wanted to “put even more emphasis on our own properties,” which included its main app and online page, as well as others like HuffPost and Tasty.
BuzzFeed is looking for other ways to make money, which includes selling sponsorships, subscriptions and memberships, and a commerce business that’s “monetized through transactions, things that people are buying through our site,” Probus said.
Because Mother Jones is a nonprofit and relies on its donors and fans more than advertising, Bauerlein said the publication weathered the social media typhoon better than others.
“Facebook has never paid for our journalism, for most of our journalism,” Bauerlein said. Regarding the search for new media, Bauerlein said, “A lot of the venture capital has been spent in the process. “
Bauerlein said Mother Jones still managed to get more followers on Facebook than ever before, which she says is a testament to customers’ appetite for their stories, though they’re harder to find.
“Now you just don’t see the data you selected to see,” Bauerlein said. It’s “a genuine broken promise to users, especially at a time when global is incredibly confusing and incredibly difficult to understand. “
Cholke said when it comes to Facebook and news, writing has been on the wall for years. Over the past decade, many publishers have noticed that their “social media traffic declined dramatically,” and Facebook trimmed the precedence of text-based articles. In 2019, Facebook paid $40 million to advertisers who alleged in a lawsuit that the company inflated their video stats, resulting in more expensive video ads.
“For a lot of people, myself included, that’s one of the first signs that we want to be cautious about it,” Cholke said.
The more than 400 U. S. media outlets associated with the Institute for Nonprofit News are struggling to find tactics to succeed with their readers, Cholke said. Some publishers are doubling down on their search traffic on Google, a strategy that carries other risks.
Last year, for example, a bug in Google Discover, a personalized news and content feed, caused traffic to decline for a number of publishers.
In addition to the tweaks that have occurred at Facebook, this begs the question, “What are the options?”Cholke said.
Chartbeat’s Nicholson said one site that’s being used is YouTube, where “some are branching out into monetizing social video.” But for the most part, she said, publications have to rely more on “their own operated platforms,” where traffic patterns are less volatile.
“When those trends started to decline on social media in terms of referral sources, that’s when other people decided to diversify, investing more in newsletters and apps,” Nicholson said.
Longtime media columnist Mathew Ingram, a chief digital writer at the Columbia Journalism Review, said Facebook was “never a good place” for news, because it “focused on emotion and sharing for other purposes” rather than on seeking the truth.
This is true even when Facebook focused on news. But when the platform started spreading the information, the economy stopped working.
“In order to keep your traffic and all your numbers where they were, you just try three times as hard, and then eventually, you’re sort of blowing all this time and resources for a diminishing return,” Ingram said.
Data from the Pew Research Center indicates that TikTok is taking market share when it comes to where consumers get their information.
In a study published in November, Pew found that the percentage of U. S. adults who say they turn to TikTok for data has more than quadrupled since 2020, from 3% to 14%. Elisa Shearer, a senior researcher at Pew, told CNBC that during that period, the share of Facebook users who reported receiving data on the site fell from 54% to 43%.
But the way people access news on TikTok is different. Rather than seeing links to stories from outside publications, the news tends to be delivered by influencers in short videos. That makes it a particularly poor source of traffic for media outlets.
Still, Bauerlein said Mother Jones is building its presence on TikTok and Instagram because the publication needs to meet consumers where they are and “serve other people who are looking for reliable information,” she said.
“If we all end up localizing news in the metaverse, then we’ll locate Mother Jones in the metaverse,” he said. What Mother Jones wouldn’t possibly do, he says, is “go all-in on one platform, because it never works. “
Disclosure: NBCUniversal, owned by Comcast, is the parent company of CNBC.
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