So instead we looked at data from NewsWhip's ' most shared Facebook publishers, July 2015.' Seven of the 10 publishers saw big traffic drop-offs in April. However, he said he did not know if this data issue was correlated with the traffic dip experienced by publishers- although he said 'we've heard our clients almost universally mention that traffic dip as well.' Facebook also now appears to have fixed this data issue, Bancroft said. He added that NewsWhip couldn't be sure of the data quality and consistency - due to much smaller reported numbers of Likes, Shares and Comments - and was unable to build its rankings over April and May. There we met our first hurdle: NewsWhip didn't publish its rankings in April - the month that showed the huge decline in traffic across a sweep of publishers! NewsWhip's marketing director Will Bancroft told us this was due to the company receiving 'notably different data from Facebook during this period'. Big, multi-million visitor drops in trafficįor the purpose of this article, we decided to look the top 10 most shared Facebook publishers, according to NewsWhip's monthly 'most shared publisher' rankings. But any dips in traffic are highly worrisome to publishers who base their online advertising rates on the amount of traffic they receive. Now, all the publishers we analyzed appear to be back to their pre-March levels, or higher, in terms of traffic. The main culprit for the loss of social traffic to these sites was Facebook while Reddit came in a close second in some cases.'Ī Facebook spokesperson told Business Insider: 'We looked at the aggregated referral traffic for the 1,000 publishers who receive the most referrals from Facebook and did not see an overall decline from March to April.' The only two common trends were the loss of direct and social traffic to every one of these sites, some less than others, but all significant amounts. Moshe Alexenberg, director of content at Similar Web, told Business Insider: 'All these sites clearly lost significant traffic over this period. Previously it's happened when Google changed its search algorithm. Sites like Upworthy saw their traffic crushed last year when Facebook changed its algorithm to feature more 'high quality' stories in the News Feed.īut this time around the drop in traffic can't be pinned on one huge change. While any publisher will tell you that their traffic is susceptible to fluctuations, it's highly unusual for every single publisher to report the same fluctuation at the same time. The findings also tally with data from Millward Brown's Compete.

Some of these sites lost tens of millions of visitors, while others lost multiple millions. The BBC, The Daily Mail, New York Times, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Fox News, and many others were among the publishers that lost traffic from March to April, according to data from SimilarWeb. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

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