• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, December 2, 2015

While some recent data from measurement outfit SimpleReach suggested that the volume of traffic referred to publishers by Facebook is declining, data from other sources suggests that may not actually be the case, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.

The SimpleReach data, first published last month, appeared to show a 32% decline in referral traffic from Facebook to a group of 30 publishers, all of which receive a large share of their traffic from the social network, over the period from January to October. Meanwhile referral traffic for the entire network of sites measured by SimpleReach dropped 17.3%.

However, other data appears to contradict these findings. WSJ points to data from other analytics outfits including Chartbeat, which tracked referral traffic to 100 big news and media publishers over the same period and found that the total volume of page views remained basically unchanged (at around 40 million page views per month) from January to October.

Furthermore, Facebook conducted its own analysis of referral traffic to the 1,000 biggest publishers linked to its network and also reported that traffic volumes were basically unchanged over this period.

As always in the online world, it’s hard to know where the truth actually lies, in light of the different methodologies and measurement sets used by various players; for one thing, assuming limited (or no) overlap in the sites tracked, it’s entirely possible the publishers tracked by SimpleReach really did experience a noteworthy decline in referral traffic for some reason, while the others did not.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Facebook has enough to worry about in its relationships with online publishers, especially regarding its Instant Articles platform. As noted in a previous post, a number of big publishing partners have expressed dissatisfaction with content monetization on Instant Articles, and are pushing back against Facebook’s rules governing the type and number of ads they can place around their content.