In six years, Facebook has gone from 30% to 7% of the weight of non-direct media traffic.

The real-time analytics company shows a 50% drop in traffic from Facebook alone in the last 12 months for 792 media it has been analyzing since 2018. In those six years, from March to March, the data of page views would have fallen back from 1.3 billion to 561 million, a 58%. And that explains why the percentage of total consumption derived from this platform has plummeted from 30% to 7% in the same period.

These numbers are a continuation of those previously published by Chartbeat: in January it indicated that clicks from Facebook that went to the media dropped by 48%, which was an acceleration compared to the 40% it had detected in the first half of that year. Even more so if one takes into account that in 2021 the same source spoke of a drop of 18% since May and in 2018, the starting year of the current comparison, Facebook's contribution was already on a downward trend.

The impact in Spain was certified by the 2023 edition of the Digital News Report of the Reuters Institute, in which Facebook consolidated in seven years a drop of 19 points in the percentage of citizens who used it for information. Its gradual withdrawal has been partly covered by the increasingly important use of messaging services such as Telegram or WhatsApp.

The downward trend in the industry's largest source of social traffic is accompanied by the progressive collapse from search, in the context of Google's algorithm changes and on the eve of its generative artificial intelligence-based model going live across the board. The combination of both factors is being felt in the advertising revenues of media outlets such as those belonging to the Australian and British legs of News Corp or the UK's largest newspaper group, Reach. In the latter case, PressGazette recalls that a 15% drop in commercial revenue in 2023 was partly attributed to these movements.

The data is in line with the results of an October Reuters Institute survey of 302 media executives in which nearly two-thirds of respondents noted their concern about the backlash of clicks from Facebook and X. Elon Musk's platform is these days more interested in attracting independent creators and larger multimedia production that will allow it to access the growing advertising budgets associated with social video and connected TV.