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Social traffic kinda stinks for news publishers now, in 3 charts

Nieman Lab · Laura Hazard Owen · last updated

A lot of the discussion of news publishers’ traffic in recent months has focused on a decline in search traffic.

But social traffic is down, too. Last week, when I was analyzing how links hurt publishers on Twitter, I asked analytics platform Chartbeat for data on how Twitter referral traffic has changed.

The decline is stark. Global Chartbeat clients’ traffic from Twitter has fallen by 70% since 2022 when Elon Musk acquired the platform.

But it’s not just Twitter. Facebook traffic has declined steeply, too.

Users are also spending less time on publishers’ sites after they click through from Facebook or Twitter. This chart looks specifically at engaged time on news and media sites:

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