The Blog

Facebook’s Top Publishers Are Losing Traffic…And A Lot Of It

Facebook advertising. It’s nothing new. Brands have been advertising on the platform for years now and it has quickly become the second largest digital advertising site, behind Google. Some brands rely heavily on their Facebook ads and spend millions of dollars every year for their campaigns. It’s these same advertisers that are taking the biggest hits as Facebook’s top publishers lose traffic.

Referral traffic from desktop and mobile to the top 30 Facebook publishers (including Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, and Fox News) decreased by 32 percent from January to October. This includes an even steeper decline of almost 43 percent among the top 10 publishers. The most dramatic of decreases took place from January to February when the average across all 30 was 75 percent.

Although it is hard to pinpoint exactly what caused this quick and dramatic decline, it’s clear there is a problem. Facebook needs to spend time looking into this before they lose these large advertisers. Once they leave, it is likely to start a trend away from Facebook advertising.

Will Facebook be able to save their biggest advertisers from failure?