The fragmented social landscape continued to fragment in 2024 as traffic from social media platforms sent to publisher sites continued its steady decline this year.
A bright spot? Largely by Google. Publishers saw an increase in traffic from Google Discover – and Google Search’s generative AI functionality did not negatively impact publisher site traffic.
Social platforms such as Instagram, Reddit and Threads drive only marginal traffic to publisher sites, according to Chartbeat data of about 3,750 sites other than Facebook.
While this shouldn’t surprise anyone, given that publishers have seen traffic from social media platforms decline for several years, it puts into perspective the effort that publishers put into trying to build an audience. newer platforms like Bluesky and Threads. Publishers are looking for new venues to distribute their content and see if they can bring audiences back to the web, while not wanting to spend too much of their limited resources on these efforts because it’s still unclear how big a role they will play. in their audience development goals.
According to data from analytics firm Chartbeat, traffic from referrals changed from November 2023 to November 2024 for 3,750 sites:
Direct operation he refused from a 23% share of total visitors to publishers’ websites to a 20% year-on-year share.
Google Discover traffic increased from a share of 22.8% to a share of 25.7%.
Google search increased slightly from a 14% share to a 14.9% share.
Bing traffic too increased marginally from 0.5% to 0.6%.
Google News he refused slightly from a 1.7% share to a 1.5% share.
Facebook traffic he refused from a share of 6.4% to a share of 4%.
X operation he refused from a share of 0.6% to a share of 0.4%.
Yahoo Search, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Threads, YouTube and LinkedIn remained o same. All sent a marginal share (less than 0.5%) to publisher sites.
(Chart note: Chartbeat changed the way they measure traffic from Google, separating Google Search and Google Discover in May 2023)
Since the launch of ChatGPT OpenAI in November 2022, publishers have reported they are concerned that the ability of a generative AI chatbot to quickly summarize information in response to user queries could lead to a decline in referral traffic that publishers receive from search results. Meanwhile, OpenAI has signed on a number of content licensing deals with publishers including attribution and links to publisher sites – while others like The New York Times have decided to take legal action against OpenAI, citing copyright infringement.
But three publishing executives — who traded anonymity for candor — told Digiday that they haven’t seen notable traffic from AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity.
Let’s take a deeper look at referral channels and how they’ve evolved this year:
Josh Awtry, senior audience development officer at Newsweek, told Digiday that Google Discover drives more traffic than Google Search or News.
“There are many days when most [Newsweek’s] the audience comes to us from Google Discover,” Awtry said, without sharing more specific audience data.
This is also the case with Reach plc. Speaking on stage at Digiday Publishing Summit Europe in October, Martin Little, Director of Audience Distribution at Reach, said that Google Discover overtook Google Search as a source of referred traffic. About 60-70% of traffic from Google came from the Discover channel.
Sarah Marshall, vice president of audience strategy at Condé Nast, told Digiday in April that Google Discover traffic was “massively” for the company compared to last year, although she did not disclose specific numbers.
But publishers had to do some work to get there. Condé Nast migrated its site outside of Google AMP during 2023 and optimized its own sites (by improving site speed and performance) to get its sites discovered by Google.
Reach plc has edited the headlines for Google Discover to highlight the most interesting parts of the story (as opposed to popular keywords for Google Search). Both Awtry and Little said that Google Discover tends to favor softer, more lifestyle-focused content — so harder news content from Newsweek, for example, isn’t a natural fit for the platform’s algorithm.
Google search
Updates to Google’s search algorithm this year and the introduction of Google’s AI search feature, AI Overviews, have challenged publishers’ search traffic.
Speaking on stage at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe, Little said traffic to Reach from Google Search was down 25% year-over-year in September.
However, Chartbeat data shows a year-over-year increase in the share of traffic from Google Search going to publisher sites.
Publishers were concerned that the introduction of AI insights – a feature that provides generated summaries of information from multiple sources to answer a user’s search query – would further degrade traffic from the platform. But it doesn’t seem like it’s coming to fruition—at least not in the aggregate.
AI Overviews “did not lead to the drastic changes that many in the industry feared, at least in the short term,” said a spokesperson for web publishing technology provider Automattic.
Data from Automattic’s “thousands” of publisher clients shows an 8% increase in traffic from Google referrals (however, the spokesperson noted that this figure includes traffic from Google Discover, Google News and Google Search).
In his third-quarter letter to shareholders, IAC CEO Joey Levin also said the company, which owns Dotdash Meredith, hasn’t seen a significant change in referral traffic due to the introduction of AI reports.
“We continue to monitor the impact of Google’s AI reports on engagement and have seen no significant changes: AI responses appeared in around 20% of relevant DDM searches in the quarter and the impact on overall traffic remained minimal, but we remain vigilant to protect our intellectual property,” Levin wrote.
Facebook
(Note on chart: “Dark social” — also called Direct Social or Email, Apps, & IMs — represents the group of visitors who came via email, apps, instant messages, or other platforms and websites that don’t allow referral data to be transmitted to the web, according to Chartbeat. .)
In the spring, Wesley Bonner, head of social media and audience development at BDG, told Digiday that Facebook was one of the biggest drivers of traffic on site for the company’s site, which accounted for 18% of total traffic in February.
But until NovemberBonner said the publisher had to “break away from traffic being the primary KPI” on the platform.
Facebook referral traffic to Automattic client sites has dropped from 14% to 6% of total traffic since the start of 2023, according to company data.
Meta has sent a number of signals to publishers that it does not prioritize traffic referrals. Late last year, Facebook sunset Quick articlesa feature that quickly loaded news stories from publishers into the Facebook app, and its head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown left the company.
Last month, Meta decided to make “views” the primary metric used to measure the performance of all content on both Facebook and Instagram — another sign that the company is focusing on how many people engage with content on the platform, not how many people. when pressed, Digiday publishing execs said at the time.
The percentage of traffic referred to Facebook (as a percentage of total traffic) fell for Automattic’s publisher clients from a high of 14% in spring 2023 to around 6% in August 20224, according to the company’s data.
Instagram has never been a major traffic driver for publishers, so it’s no surprise that it accounted for just 0.22% of total publisher traffic in November, roughly flat year-on-year, according to Chartbeat data. And Threads, another Meta platform, secured an even smaller volume of traffic – a share of 0.02%. Earlier this year, publishers experimented with different types of content shared in Threads posts to see what stuck with their audience, but held off on pouring too many resources into the platform until it proved worthwhile. Three social media executives told Digiday last month that they still haven’t changed anything in the effort.
Blues
Often seen as an alternative to X, Bluesky has been the new social platform on the block and has attracted a recent surge of new users and publishers. The Boston Globe has they have already seen more traffic from referrals from Bluesky than from Threads.
But the platform is so new — and traffic coming from it so small (about 0.017% of social referrals in November, according to Chartbeat data) — that publishers have yet to figure out a strategy for Bluesky or what role it will play. in its efforts to develop audiences.
According to Chartbeat, referral traffic from Bluesky was equal to about 0.8% of referral traffic to X publishers.
X
Speaking of X, the platform accounted for 2.6% of social referrals to publishers in November, according to Chartbeat.
Referrals from X fell by nearly half from spring 2023 to August 2024, according to Automattic data — bringing in just 0.6% of traffic.
The role of X has declined among some publishers. The Guardian announced it was leaving the platform last month, joining NPR, The Dodo and Polygon in their exodus last year.
But these publishers are anomalies. Over a dozen major publishers Digiday said that X still played a role in their audience development and content distribution strategies – and that while the referral traffic coming from the platform was small, it was significant enough to remain active there.
