#try parse.ly instead
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Why deal with Google Analytics when you could use the best analytics plugin instead?
Hint: It's Parse.ly.
#no one actually uses GA for real time anyway#try parse.ly instead#now available on wordpress#content analytics#parse.ly#analytics#google analytics
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Facebook kills off news: Publishers panic, try to remember how to do SEO
By now you’ve no doubt heard the news that’s been shaking up the internet since late last week.
But in case you just came back online after a week-long internet blackout, here’s what’s happening: on Thursday 11th January, Facebook announced a major change to the way posts are ranked in News Feed.
In order to promote more “meaningful” interaction with friends and family, Facebook said that it would “prioritize posts from friends and family over public content … including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses”.
In general, brands have not tended to rely on Facebook for traffic since it dramatically reduced the organic reach of branded content a little over three years ago, forcing brands to pay for reach or go elsewhere for traffic. However, publishers have long been the exception to that rule, with Facebook acting as a huge – and vital – source of referral traffic to publishers’ websites.
This has led many publishers to plan their strategy and output directly around Facebook (see: the much-derided media “pivot to video”, which was driven in large part by Facebook). But Facebook’s announcement of Thursday has put paid to all of that – or at least, put a big dent in the potential traffic that publishers can earn from its platform.
Deprived of referral traffic from Facebook, will publishers be turning en masse back to SEO to restore their fortunes? Let’s look at some of the broader industry shifts underpinning this change, and what it means for the importance of search for publishers.
Trading places: Google is back on top for referral traffic
The truth is that Facebook’s referral traffic to publishers has been in decline for some time now. According to data from digital analytics company Parse.ly, the percentage of external traffic that Facebook provides to publishers decreased from 40% to 26% between January 2017 and January 2018, while Google’s rose from 34% to 44% over the same period.
This means that in a direct reversal of 2015, when Facebook rocked the industry by overtaking Google as a source of referral traffic for publishers, Google is now back in the number one spot. And this all happened before Facebook’s News Feed announcement even took place.
Publishers have also been seeing more traffic from Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) than Facebook equivalent Instant Articles, another situation that reversed itself over the last year. According to Parse.ly, publisher traffic from AMP increased from 4.72% in January 2017 to 11.78% in November 2017, while Instant Articles declined from 10.31% of publisher traffic in January down to 8.54% in November.
When Facebook overtook Google for referral traffic back in 2015, this seemed to herald the dawn – or perhaps the zenith – of a new age of social sharing and publishing, in which social media was the new search.
At a Content Marketing Association Digital Breakfast in June 2016, veteran digital journalist Adam Tinworth remarked that social networks had taken over the search engine’s traditional role of “finding something to read” online. As a result, Google and other search engines moved into more of an “answer engine” role, moving away from search towards a single, definitive answer to users’ queries.
So with Google back on top for referral traffic, are we seeing a return to the status quo?
The Google-Facebook merry-go-round
In fact, Google and Facebook’s continual back-and-forth is the status quo. They have been chasing each other around in circles for years now, each taking it in turns to try their hand at the other’s specialist area.
Google experimented with social networking; Facebook became the go-to place to find content. Both launched lightning-fast takes on the mobile web – Accelerated Mobile Pages and Instant Articles – in 2015 with a global roll-out in 2016. Now, Facebook is returning to its “roots” of showing you what your family and friends are up to, while the latest updates to Google’s smart assistant indicate that Google is moving back into surfacing content.
Google and Facebook: Destined to chase each other in circles for eternity
(Image by monstreh, available via CC0)
In other words, this is just the most recent step in a dance that has been going on for more than 10 years. Facebook might have ceded some ground to Google in the realm of referral traffic to publishers, partly in a bid to rid itself of the fake news scandal that has dogged it since mid to late 2016.
However, the two continue to vie for dominance in countless other areas, such as artificial intelligence, smart home hubs, digital assistants, and advertising. Facebook continues to drive its investment in online video, encroaching on Google-owned YouTube’s territory, while Google recently announced a new foray into social publishing with Google Stamp.
At the height of the fake news controversy, Google and Facebook’s names frequently appeared side-by-side, with both companies accused of peddling false information to their users and perpetrating the “filter bubble” that allows fake news to thrive.
As a result, some have speculated that Google might now follow in Facebook’s footsteps and take steps to distance itself from publishers.
However, Google is already taking action – or at least appearing to take action – against fake news on its search engine by implementing ‘fact-checking’ labels, partnering with the International Fact-Checking Network to combat misinformation, and purging questionable overseas websites that mask their country of origin from Google News.
Unless there is another significant wave of backlash over fake news to force Google’s hand, it seems likely that Google will take the “win” over Facebook and avoid jeopardizing its relationship with publishers – particularly given its recent moves to become more publisher-friendly by supporting paywalled content.
Meanwhile, publishers need to work out how to reconfigure their online strategy with Facebook much less in the picture. Will we be seeing a newfound reliance on SEO and search marketing?
Publishers: time to learn from SEO
Publishers are about to find themselves in the very same position that brand marketers found themselves at the end of 2014, when Facebook announced that it was killing off organic reach for brand Pages. Just like publisher referral traffic now, brand Page reach had been in steady decline for some time, and the Facebook announcement only confirmed what many already suspected was coming.
At the time, brands were forced to abandon a marketing model that relied on free promotion from Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of Likes, and instead pay for advertising or go elsewhere for their traffic. Sound familiar?
The situation with publishers is therefore nothing new, but is still a huge blow for media organizations who have developed a “social-first” strategy over the years and rely on Facebook as a primary source of traffic.
Following the news that Google had overtaken Facebook as a source of referral traffic, Adam Tinworth blogged: “Business models dependent on Facebook growth are dead in the water, unless you can afford to buy that growth.
“Publishers will need a renewed focus on SEO — especially those that have been social-first.”
Writing for The Drum, founder and managing director of 93digital, Alex Price, observed that Facebook was following Google in “placing its long-term bet on quality [content]”, singling out Facebook-driven publications like 9GAG, Unilad and The Lad Bible as most likely to suffer from the change.
“If I were them, I would be thinking hard about the teams of people I employ to churn out social media content and how sustainable that now is.”
He added that publishers would need to focus on retention and repeat visits to drive long-term value, and optimize the experience of their website, particularly on mobile, in order to build a sustainable source of revenue in the post-Facebook age.
Publish quality content, increase engagement, optimize for mobile… if you’re in SEO, this list will be starting to sound very familiar. It’s a mantra that the search industry has been repeating for years.
High-quality publishers are likely doing most of these things already, so their task will be to ramp up those efforts while diversifying their sources of traffic beyond Facebook. This will stand them in good stead on the search engine results page and beyond.
For lower-quality social publishers, things might not be so easy. After all, these publications evolved specifically to cater to a social sharing environment, which will soon no longer exist.
Much like the brand Pages of yore with hugely inflated Like counts, publishers will need to figure out how to deliver a message of real value to consumers, or risk disappearing altogether.
from IM Tips And Tricks https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/01/17/facebook-kills-off-news-publishers-panic-try-to-remember-how-to-do-seo/
from Rising Phoenix SEO https://risingphxseo.tumblr.com/post/169809957615
0 notes
Text
Facebook kills off news: Publishers panic, try to remember how to do SEO
By now you’ve no doubt heard the news that’s been shaking up the internet since late last week.
But in case you just came back online after a week-long internet blackout, here’s what’s happening: on Thursday 11th January, Facebook announced a major change to the way posts are ranked in News Feed.
In order to promote more “meaningful” interaction with friends and family, Facebook said that it would “prioritize posts from friends and family over public content … including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses”.
In general, brands have not tended to rely on Facebook for traffic since it dramatically reduced the organic reach of branded content a little over three years ago, forcing brands to pay for reach or go elsewhere for traffic. However, publishers have long been the exception to that rule, with Facebook acting as a huge – and vital – source of referral traffic to publishers’ websites.
This has led many publishers to plan their strategy and output directly around Facebook (see: the much-derided media “pivot to video”, which was driven in large part by Facebook). But Facebook’s announcement of Thursday has put paid to all of that – or at least, put a big dent in the potential traffic that publishers can earn from its platform.
Deprived of referral traffic from Facebook, will publishers be turning en masse back to SEO to restore their fortunes? Let’s look at some of the broader industry shifts underpinning this change, and what it means for the importance of search for publishers.
Trading places: Google is back on top for referral traffic
The truth is that Facebook’s referral traffic to publishers has been in decline for some time now. According to data from digital analytics company Parse.ly, the percentage of external traffic that Facebook provides to publishers decreased from 40% to 26% between January 2017 and January 2018, while Google’s rose from 34% to 44% over the same period.
This means that in a direct reversal of 2015, when Facebook rocked the industry by overtaking Google as a source of referral traffic for publishers, Google is now back in the number one spot. And this all happened before Facebook’s News Feed announcement even took place.
Publishers have also been seeing more traffic from Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) than Facebook equivalent Instant Articles, another situation that reversed itself over the last year. According to Parse.ly, publisher traffic from AMP increased from 4.72% in January 2017 to 11.78% in November 2017, while Instant Articles declined from 10.31% of publisher traffic in January down to 8.54% in November.
When Facebook overtook Google for referral traffic back in 2015, this seemed to herald the dawn – or perhaps the zenith – of a new age of social sharing and publishing, in which social media was the new search.
At a Content Marketing Association Digital Breakfast in June 2016, veteran digital journalist Adam Tinworth remarked that social networks had taken over the search engine’s traditional role of “finding something to read” online. As a result, Google and other search engines moved into more of an “answer engine” role, moving away from search towards a single, definitive answer to users’ queries.
So with Google back on top for referral traffic, are we seeing a return to the status quo?
The Google-Facebook merry-go-round
In fact, Google and Facebook’s continual back-and-forth is the status quo. They have been chasing each other around in circles for years now, each taking it in turns to try their hand at the other’s specialist area.
Google experimented with social networking; Facebook became the go-to place to find content. Both launched lightning-fast takes on the mobile web – Accelerated Mobile Pages and Instant Articles – in 2015 with a global roll-out in 2016. Now, Facebook is returning to its “roots” of showing you what your family and friends are up to, while the latest updates to Google’s smart assistant indicate that Google is moving back into surfacing content.
Google and Facebook: Destined to chase each other in circles for eternity
(Image by monstreh, available via CC0)
In other words, this is just the most recent step in a dance that has been going on for more than 10 years. Facebook might have ceded some ground to Google in the realm of referral traffic to publishers, partly in a bid to rid itself of the fake news scandal that has dogged it since mid to late 2016.
However, the two continue to vie for dominance in countless other areas, such as artificial intelligence, smart home hubs, digital assistants, and advertising. Facebook continues to drive its investment in online video, encroaching on Google-owned YouTube’s territory, while Google recently announced a new foray into social publishing with Google Stamp.
At the height of the fake news controversy, Google and Facebook’s names frequently appeared side-by-side, with both companies accused of peddling false information to their users and perpetrating the “filter bubble” that allows fake news to thrive.
As a result, some have speculated that Google might now follow in Facebook’s footsteps and take steps to distance itself from publishers.
However, Google is already taking action – or at least appearing to take action – against fake news on its search engine by implementing ‘fact-checking’ labels, partnering with the International Fact-Checking Network to combat misinformation, and purging questionable overseas websites that mask their country of origin from Google News.
Unless there is another significant wave of backlash over fake news to force Google’s hand, it seems likely that Google will take the “win” over Facebook and avoid jeopardizing its relationship with publishers – particularly given its recent moves to become more publisher-friendly by supporting paywalled content.
Meanwhile, publishers need to work out how to reconfigure their online strategy with Facebook much less in the picture. Will we be seeing a newfound reliance on SEO and search marketing?
Publishers: time to learn from SEO
Publishers are about to find themselves in the very same position that brand marketers found themselves at the end of 2014, when Facebook announced that it was killing off organic reach for brand Pages. Just like publisher referral traffic now, brand Page reach had been in steady decline for some time, and the Facebook announcement only confirmed what many already suspected was coming.
At the time, brands were forced to abandon a marketing model that relied on free promotion from Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of Likes, and instead pay for advertising or go elsewhere for their traffic. Sound familiar?
The situation with publishers is therefore nothing new, but is still a huge blow for media organizations who have developed a “social-first” strategy over the years and rely on Facebook as a primary source of traffic.
Following the news that Google had overtaken Facebook as a source of referral traffic, Adam Tinworth blogged: “Business models dependent on Facebook growth are dead in the water, unless you can afford to buy that growth.
“Publishers will need a renewed focus on SEO — especially those that have been social-first.”
Writing for The Drum, founder and managing director of 93digital, Alex Price, observed that Facebook was following Google in “placing its long-term bet on quality [content]”, singling out Facebook-driven publications like 9GAG, Unilad and The Lad Bible as most likely to suffer from the change.
“If I were them, I would be thinking hard about the teams of people I employ to churn out social media content and how sustainable that now is.”
He added that publishers would need to focus on retention and repeat visits to drive long-term value, and optimize the experience of their website, particularly on mobile, in order to build a sustainable source of revenue in the post-Facebook age.
Publish quality content, increase engagement, optimize for mobile… if you’re in SEO, this list will be starting to sound very familiar. It’s a mantra that the search industry has been repeating for years.
High-quality publishers are likely doing most of these things already, so their task will be to ramp up those efforts while diversifying their sources of traffic beyond Facebook. This will stand them in good stead on the search engine results page and beyond.
For lower-quality social publishers, things might not be so easy. After all, these publications evolved specifically to cater to a social sharing environment, which will soon no longer exist.
Much like the brand Pages of yore with hugely inflated Like counts, publishers will need to figure out how to deliver a message of real value to consumers, or risk disappearing altogether.
source https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/01/17/facebook-kills-off-news-publishers-panic-try-to-remember-how-to-do-seo/
from Rising Phoenix SEO http://risingphoenixseo.blogspot.com/2018/01/facebook-kills-off-news-publishers.html
0 notes
Text
Facebook kills off news: Publishers panic, try to remember how to do SEO
By now you’ve no doubt heard the news that’s been shaking up the internet since late last week.
But in case you just came back online after a week-long internet blackout, here’s what’s happening: on Thursday 11th January, Facebook announced a major change to the way posts are ranked in News Feed.
In order to promote more “meaningful” interaction with friends and family, Facebook said that it would “prioritize posts from friends and family over public content … including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses”.
In general, brands have not tended to rely on Facebook for traffic since it dramatically reduced the organic reach of branded content a little over three years ago, forcing brands to pay for reach or go elsewhere for traffic. However, publishers have long been the exception to that rule, with Facebook acting as a huge – and vital – source of referral traffic to publishers’ websites.
This has led many publishers to plan their strategy and output directly around Facebook (see: the much-derided media “pivot to video”, which was driven in large part by Facebook). But Facebook’s announcement of Thursday has put paid to all of that – or at least, put a big dent in the potential traffic that publishers can earn from its platform.
Deprived of referral traffic from Facebook, will publishers be turning en masse back to SEO to restore their fortunes? Let’s look at some of the broader industry shifts underpinning this change, and what it means for the importance of search for publishers.
Trading places: Google is back on top for referral traffic
The truth is that Facebook’s referral traffic to publishers has been in decline for some time now. According to data from digital analytics company Parse.ly, the percentage of external traffic that Facebook provides to publishers decreased from 40% to 26% between January 2017 and January 2018, while Google’s rose from 34% to 44% over the same period.
This means that in a direct reversal of 2015, when Facebook rocked the industry by overtaking Google as a source of referral traffic for publishers, Google is now back in the number one spot. And this all happened before Facebook’s News Feed announcement even took place.
Publishers have also been seeing more traffic from Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) than Facebook equivalent Instant Articles, another situation that reversed itself over the last year. According to Parse.ly, publisher traffic from AMP increased from 4.72% in January 2017 to 11.78% in November 2017, while Instant Articles declined from 10.31% of publisher traffic in January down to 8.54% in November.
When Facebook overtook Google for referral traffic back in 2015, this seemed to herald the dawn – or perhaps the zenith – of a new age of social sharing and publishing, in which social media was the new search.
At a Content Marketing Association Digital Breakfast in June 2016, veteran digital journalist Adam Tinworth remarked that social networks had taken over the search engine’s traditional role of “finding something to read” online. As a result, Google and other search engines moved into more of an “answer engine” role, moving away from search towards a single, definitive answer to users’ queries.
So with Google back on top for referral traffic, are we seeing a return to the status quo?
The Google-Facebook merry-go-round
In fact, Google and Facebook’s continual back-and-forth is the status quo. They have been chasing each other around in circles for years now, each taking it in turns to try their hand at the other’s specialist area.
Google experimented with social networking; Facebook became the go-to place to find content. Both launched lightning-fast takes on the mobile web – Accelerated Mobile Pages and Instant Articles – in 2015 with a global roll-out in 2016. Now, Facebook is returning to its “roots” of showing you what your family and friends are up to, while the latest updates to Google’s smart assistant indicate that Google is moving back into surfacing content.
Google and Facebook: Destined to chase each other in circles for eternity
(Image by monstreh, available via CC0)
In other words, this is just the most recent step in a dance that has been going on for more than 10 years. Facebook might have ceded some ground to Google in the realm of referral traffic to publishers, partly in a bid to rid itself of the fake news scandal that has dogged it since mid to late 2016.
However, the two continue to vie for dominance in countless other areas, such as artificial intelligence, smart home hubs, digital assistants, and advertising. Facebook continues to drive its investment in online video, encroaching on Google-owned YouTube’s territory, while Google recently announced a new foray into social publishing with Google Stamp.
At the height of the fake news controversy, Google and Facebook’s names frequently appeared side-by-side, with both companies accused of peddling false information to their users and perpetrating the “filter bubble” that allows fake news to thrive.
As a result, some have speculated that Google might now follow in Facebook’s footsteps and take steps to distance itself from publishers.
However, Google is already taking action – or at least appearing to take action – against fake news on its search engine by implementing ‘fact-checking’ labels, partnering with the International Fact-Checking Network to combat misinformation, and purging questionable overseas websites that mask their country of origin from Google News.
Unless there is another significant wave of backlash over fake news to force Google’s hand, it seems likely that Google will take the “win” over Facebook and avoid jeopardizing its relationship with publishers – particularly given its recent moves to become more publisher-friendly by supporting paywalled content.
Meanwhile, publishers need to work out how to reconfigure their online strategy with Facebook much less in the picture. Will we be seeing a newfound reliance on SEO and search marketing?
Publishers: time to learn from SEO
Publishers are about to find themselves in the very same position that brand marketers found themselves at the end of 2014, when Facebook announced that it was killing off organic reach for brand Pages. Just like publisher referral traffic now, brand Page reach had been in steady decline for some time, and the Facebook announcement only confirmed what many already suspected was coming.
At the time, brands were forced to abandon a marketing model that relied on free promotion from Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of Likes, and instead pay for advertising or go elsewhere for their traffic. Sound familiar?
The situation with publishers is therefore nothing new, but is still a huge blow for media organizations who have developed a “social-first” strategy over the years and rely on Facebook as a primary source of traffic.
Following the news that Google had overtaken Facebook as a source of referral traffic, Adam Tinworth blogged: “Business models dependent on Facebook growth are dead in the water, unless you can afford to buy that growth.
“Publishers will need a renewed focus on SEO — especially those that have been social-first.”
Writing for The Drum, founder and managing director of 93digital, Alex Price, observed that Facebook was following Google in “placing its long-term bet on quality [content]”, singling out Facebook-driven publications like 9GAG, Unilad and The Lad Bible as most likely to suffer from the change.
“If I were them, I would be thinking hard about the teams of people I employ to churn out social media content and how sustainable that now is.”
He added that publishers would need to focus on retention and repeat visits to drive long-term value, and optimize the experience of their website, particularly on mobile, in order to build a sustainable source of revenue in the post-Facebook age.
Publish quality content, increase engagement, optimize for mobile… if you’re in SEO, this list will be starting to sound very familiar. It’s a mantra that the search industry has been repeating for years.
High-quality publishers are likely doing most of these things already, so their task will be to ramp up those efforts while diversifying their sources of traffic beyond Facebook. This will stand them in good stead on the search engine results page and beyond.
For lower-quality social publishers, things might not be so easy. After all, these publications evolved specifically to cater to a social sharing environment, which will soon no longer exist.
Much like the brand Pages of yore with hugely inflated Like counts, publishers will need to figure out how to deliver a message of real value to consumers, or risk disappearing altogether.
from Search Engine Watch https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/01/17/facebook-kills-off-news-publishers-panic-try-to-remember-how-to-do-seo/
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Text
Why Facebook's news feed shake-up may be a smart move to squeeze more money from publishers (GOOG, FB, TWTR)
Facebook will change its news feed so that people will see more updates from friends and family, and fewer organic posts from news publishers and brands.
It's a drastic change for Facebook, which thinks that "passive" news consumption is bad for people's mental health.
But it's also a canny commercial move, analysts told Business Insider, because now Facebook can squeeze money out of publishers to appear in the news feed.
Many publishers get huge amounts of referral traffic from Facebook and might turn instead to Google as a more reliable platform partner.
Facebook has once again proven itself a massively unreliable partner to news publishers who need the site for referral traffic.
The company announced on Thursday that it would reduce the amount of posts from businesses and media in the news feed, and instead prioritise updates from friends and family.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said "passively" consuming updates from media and brands wasn't good for people's mental health, and that the firm wanted to encourage people to post updates, comment on friends' status, and share photos.
The thinking is that you don't get much emotional nourishment from glancing through a stream of headlines, but you do feel happier when you're interacting with your friends. That balance is currently skewed the wrong way in the news feed.
While Facebook's stated goal of making people feel happier while using social media is commendable, it's left publishers in the dark about what to expect.
Big media brands such as BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and — yes — Business Insider get huge amounts of referral traffic by publishing stories to people's news feed from their brand pages.
According to December data from Parse.ly, Facebook accounted for 26% of news organisations' traffic. More traffic makes these publications more appealing to advertisers, so anything that threatens those numbers is a big deal.
If Facebook alters the news feed so people are seeing and clicking on fewer news posts, it follows that publishers will see a significant dropoff in readership.
"For publishers, Facebook is frustratingly Mum about all of this," Enders media analyst Matti Littunen told Business Insider. "There's often very little warning before something like this happens or, when something happens, it's hard to figure out what's going on."
He added: "A key question is whether this will affect all publications in the same way."
According to Littunen, one reason Facebook is having to make changes is because it has rewarded spam publishers as much as quality publishers. "Quality has not paid off on Facebook," he said.
Facebook has only recently made efforts to fix that, for example using artificial intelligence to downrank posts that ask you for shares or likes. But the damage may already be done and, thanks to low-quality posts from spammy publishers, big media brands may have to pay the price in traffic.
Facebook tested a split news feed — and publishers saw a massive traffic drop
Littunen and Ian Maude, group director of digital marketing firm Be Heard Group, both pointed to Facebook's experiments in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, and other emerging markets, where the firm split the news feed in two.
One news feed was for friends-and-family posts only, while the secondary "Explore" feed was for organic posts from businesses and publishers.
According to a joint report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Oxford University, Slovakian news media saw a 400% drop in interactions and a two-thirds drop in reach.
For Maude, Facebook could roll out the split news feed feature more widely. "It's clearly driven by a desire not to alienate their users, and to keep people using platform."
Littunen described the experiment as "radical," and thinks Facebook will use the data from those tests to inform how to restructure the news feed in other countries. But it may not be as drastic as splitting the news feed in two and Facebook's head of news feed, Adam Mosseri, said in October that there was no plan to roll the feature out more widely.
Publishers have long been suspicious Facebook wants more money
Even if Facebook doesn't do anything as drastic as relegating publishers to a secondary news feed, any kind of change will look suspicious to media brands which have long been battling declining organic reach.
"The suspicion has always been that cutting organic reach of commercial publishers on Facebook forces them to spend more on advertising to promote their posts," said Maude.
It's noticeable, added Maude, that Facebook didn't talk about cutting the number of paid-for ads in the news feed, suggesting advertisers who cough up will see as much reach as ever.
"If anything this could encourage publications to spend more on Facebook ads to try and maintain or increase their traffic," he concluded.
The media's biggest frenemy, Google, suddenly looks like a good bet
Given Facebook's continued importance to publishers, it's unlikely they will abandon such a strong traffic source, even if that traffic becomes incrementally harder to obtain, said Maude.
"You're likely to see more publications talking about how it's important for them not to be so reliant on Facebook," he said. "But when Facebook is such a huge platform, with such a huge audience, it's difficult to walk away from it."
Google, which both benefits publishers through search referral traffic and hinders them by eating up digital advertising spend, has been making serious efforts to improve its relationships with news brands.
Chief executive Sundar Pichai met with news publishers to discuss how Google could help attract more paying customers. The firm also rejigged its search engine to drop its unpopular "first-click free" feature, which ranked some publishers higher if they offer some stories for free.
"Google is moving in the direction of trying to make the economics of news work," said Littunen. "Facebook seems to be taking the attitude that news is a problem."
Google still has some difficulties, he added, like having a coherent approach to news publishers across its advertising, content, and search arms. "If Google is serious about courting publishers, they will need to figure out how to make different parts of their business work together," he said.
And finally, publishers might turn to a service that's always been more friend than enemy: Twitter.
One reason Facebook prioritised news in the news feed was to compete with Twitter, which is still popular as a way of sharing real-time information. If Facebook scales those efforts back, there's room for Twitter to capitalise, said Littunen.
SEE ALSO: Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is changing its News Feed so it's actually 'good for people'
Join the conversation about this story »
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