Facebook hasn鈥檛 made many friends among publishers lately. The company鈥檚 announcement, it would de-prioritise publishing content in its algorithm had many in the industry up in arms. However, there are signs that the drop in referral traffic from Facebook is offset by traffic gains coming from Google searches, especially in the mobile section.
indicates that this phenomenon isn鈥檛 all that new. The below infographic shows that Google mobile searches have closed in and overtaken mobile referral traffic from Facebook from August last year onwards.
This is probably linked to the fact that 鈥渕ore publishers have been signing up for the Google publishing format launched in 2015 known as Accelerated Mobile Pages,鈥 according to Recode. The AMP service hosts publishers鈥 content on Google servers, which reduces loading time for mobile users.
The good news for the publishing industry is that Facebook referral traffic losses can be compensated. The bad news is that this doesn鈥檛 solve the overall problem of dependency on platforms. It might make publishers even more dependent on just one player.
Publishing
Google's Replacing Facebook as Top Referrer to Publishers
Description
This chart shows weekly referral traffic to publishers websites (in billions of page views)
