• by Colin Kirkland , May 10, 2024

Although more U.S. readers are getting local news from online forums than daily newspapers, it's becoming clear that Meta is attempting to lessen the flow of news content on its family of apps, especially Facebook.

According to a new report by publisher analytics firm Chartbeat and digital intelligence platform Similarweb, referral traffic from Facebook to publisher websites has declined 50% over the past 12 months.

Chartbeat has been tracking Facebook traffic to a group of 792 news and media sites since 2018, showing that over the past six years, referrals to the sites have plunged by 58% -- from 1.3 billion in March 2018 to 561 million last month, according to Press Gazette, which originally reported on the study.

In terms of total referrals, Facebook is now responsible for driving less than a quarter of their 2018 level -- down from 30% in March 2018 to just 7% in March 2024. Which has especially hurt small publishers.

Combined page-view referrals from Facebook for the 316 smaller publishers (those with under 10,000 average daily page views) included in the analysis are seeing 2% of the traffic they saw six years ago.

While page views to large publishers (those with over 100,000 average daily page views) and medium-sized outlets (between 10,000 and 100,000 views) are seeing about 50% of their March 2018 levels.

Meta has been curbing its news output for years now. The tech giant this year announced that it would be deprecating its Facebook News tab in the U.S. and Australia, following earlier cutoffs of the tab in the U.K., France and Germany.

“The number of people using Facebook News in Australia and the U.S. has dropped over 80% last year,” the company wrote in a blog post, adding that people don't come to the platform for news, but to “connect” and “discover new opportunities, passions and interests.”

In addition, Meta banned news on Facebook in Canada and said it would stop recommending political content on Instagram and Threads. Overall, after the Capitol riots on January 6, when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has to testify in front of Congress, the company has been attempting to lessen the spread of hate and debate on its apps, which tends to root itself in political content.