Articles by: "Rande Price, Research VP – DCN"

Fake news fools most of the people most of the time

December 13, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

American adults are fooled by fake news headlines approximately 75% of the time. Those likely to turn to Facebook for news are more likely to think fake news headlines are correct than those using other platforms according to a survey conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs for BuzzFeed News. Consumers find it difficult to filter out fake news headlines without the necessary background filled-in, particularly in social media channels. Interestingly, consumers are even likely to believe fake news headlines that don’t necessarily fit with their ideological beliefs.

Almost one-third of respondents recalled at least one of a selection of fake news headlines from the election. In comparison, 57% of respondents recalled at least one of the real news headlines tested in the survey. Interestingly, consumers who identified themselves as Republican are more likely to think fake election news stories are very or somewhat accurate. Eight in 10 Republicans rated fake news headlines as accurate (among those they recognized), compared seven in 10 Democrats.

The fake news headline recalled by the largest number of respondents, 22%, is the story from the website the Denver Guardian, “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide.” The highest awareness for a true news headline was at 34% of respondents for recalling Trump “absolutely” requiring Muslims to register.

One of the highest recalled true news headlines was the CBS News post-election story about Donald Trump stating he will not accept a presidential salary, “Donald Trump on Refusing Presidential Salary: ‘I’m Not Taking It.’” More than half of respondents (57%) recalled seeing this headline. Another news headline with a 90% accuracy rating, among the 157 respondents who recognized it, was the New York Times op-ed “I Ran the CIA. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton.”

Respondents rated the fake news story “FBI Director Comey Just Put a Trump Sign on His Front Lawn,” with the highest overall accuracy rating. Among the 186 people who recalled seeing it, 81% said it was very or somewhat accurate.

News headlines tested:

FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide (Fake, 22% recall)
Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement (Fake, 19% recall)
Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: “I Was Paid $3,500 to Protest Trump’s Rally” (Fake, 19% recall)
Donald Trump Sent His Own Plane to Transport 200 Stranded Marines (Fake, 14% recall)
FBI Director Comey Just Put a Trump Sign on His Front Lawn (Fake, 10% recall)
Donald Trump on Refusing Presidential Salary: “I’m Not Taking It” (True, 57% recall)
Donald Trump Says He’d “Absolutely” Require Muslims to Register (True, 34% recall)
Trump: “I Will Protect Our LGBTQ Citizens” (True, 27% recall)
Barbara Bush: “I Don’t Know How Women Can Vote” for Trump (True, 25% recall)
Melania Trump’s Girl-on-Girl Photos from Racy Shoot Revealed (True, 23% recall)
I Ran the CIA. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton (True, 11% recall)

Consumers frequently see fake news in their social media feeds according to another survey on fake news conducted by Morning Consult, a media and technology. They found that amost one-third of respondents (31%) reported seeing a fake news story online more than once a day. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said they started to read a story online only to realize it was fake.
In terms of social platform usage, participants of the Ipsos survey cited Facebook as the most popular with just less than half (47%) visiting Facebook multiple times per day and another 15% report visiting once a day. YouTube was the second most popular social platform. Twenty percent stated they visit YouTube multiple times per day and 11% visit once a day. The fact that fake news headlines are often remembered and said to be accurate by a strong number of consumers points to the fact that consumers have a difficult time discerning between fact and fictional news on social media.

Advertising | Industry-Research

Ad-spending growth will slow in 2017

December 7, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Magna Global, GroupM and Zenith forecast lower to flat sales growth with more sales dollars working in digital for 2017. Magna Global attributes slower growth to current economic and political insecurity as well as the lack of a major recurring event (i.e. Presidential election or the Olympics). GroupM adds that slower growth rates are due to energy pricing as well as political concerns.

Magna Global also reports that next year’s growth rate would be the lowest in 15 years excluding the recession in 2008-2009. Even with slow growth rate All three agencies presented this week at the USB Media and Communication Conference. While the analyses and forecasts, they provide insight into the factors at hand impacting the global and local advertising marketplace.

Key highlights from each of the agency’s forecasts:

Magna Global predicts overall ad growth for the global marketplace is 3.6%, reaching $510.7 billion, compared to this year’s growth rate of 5.7% pace, reaching $493 billion.

S. growth is expected to align with global slowing to 3.6%. This year U.S. advertising sales grew by close to 7% to $180 billion, it’s strongest growth in 12 years. Discounting political and Olympic spending ($3.5 billion), ad growth for 2016 would have been 5.1%.

Digital ad sales will lead the marketplace with market share of 40% ($202 billion), compared to linear TV ad sales ($186 billion, 36%). Digital will continue to grow to win 50% of the market by 2021 ($299 billion) while linear TV will level off at $195 billion (33%).
Digital ad sales (52% share) will be comprised mostly of mobile, driven by usage of mobile devices.
Digital growth this year was also driven by video formats (+35%) and social formats (+43%), while search banner ad sales declined (-5%).
Google and Facebook, will continue to dominate search and social, controlling more than half (54%) of the total digital advertising market compared to 44% a year ago.

GroupM forecasts overall ad growth for the global market at 4.4% to $547.3 billion in 2017, close to growth rate of 2016 at 4.3% ($424.5 billion).

S. will continue to trail the global pace at 2.6% growth ($193.6 billion) in 2017 from the 3.1% growth ($188.7 billion) forecasted this year.
Digital advertising will capture 72 cents of every new ad dollar and TV 21 cents in 2017, growing from 77 cents and 17 cents, respectively, this year.

Zenith forecasts the growth at 4.4% (reaching $566 billion), flat compared to 2016.

S. ad spending will grow to 4.3% (close to $190.8 billion) from 3.5% ($182.6 billion) in 2016.
Social media’s increased usage will account for 20% of all Internet advertising in 2019, up from 16% in 2016.
Mobile advertising growth slowed down to 48% in 2016 compared to 94% growth in 2015 and will grow an average of 26% each year between 2016 and 2019
While television still dominants the ad market, accounting for 36% of total ad spend in 2016, the Internet is expected to overtake television to become the largest advertising medium in 2017.
Desktop Internet advertising will continue to decrease at an average rate of 4% per year as advertisers follow consumers to mobile.

All three agencies still see television as an important channel for branding. Online video can also be a good branding vehicle but it doesn’t yet have the massive or broad reach of television. The agencies also agree that print’s (newspapers and magazine) share of global spend will continue to decline year to year. Zenith forecasts the rate of decline at 4% to 5% each year between 2016 and 2019.

Industry-Research

Social media is a daily touchpoint for most Americans

November 29, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Social media is part of Americans every day routine with a majority stating that they get their news through social media. In fact, half of the Americans turned to social media to learn about the 2016 presidential election reports Pew Research Center’s Social Media Update 2016, which was based on a national survey of over 1,500 adults.

The present state of the social media landscape includes 79% of Americans using Facebook, more than double the number of its nearest competitor, Instagram (32%). Other top social media platforms includes 31% of Americans use Pinterest, LinkedIn (29%) and Twitter (24%). In terms of reflecting the total U.S. population (including those consumers who do not use the internet), 68% of all U.S. adults are Facebook users, 28% use Instagram, 26% use Pinterest, 25% use LinkedIn and 21% use Twitter.

Facebook clearly remains the most dominant social media platform out there. It is the strongest social platform of the five included in this study among online young adults, Eighty-eight percent of adults 18-29 use Facebook; followed by Instagram at 59%, Pinterest and Twitter at 36%, each, and Linkedin at 34%. Facebook is also gaining traction among older adults, ages 65+. Close to two-thirds of adults ages 65 plus now use Facebook.

Facebook is a daily habit for most of its users with 76% visiting the site daily and of the daily visitors, 55% visiting multiple times a day. Interestingly, 56% of online adults use more than one of the five social media platforms included in this study with the highest duplication of usage on Facebook. This means that 95% of Instagram users, 93% Twitter, 92% Pinterest also use Facebook.

Social media apps are also popular among close to three-quarters of Americans (72%) using smartphones. Twenty-nine percent of smartphone owners use general-purpose messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Kik. Almost one-fifth (24%) use messaging apps that automatically delete sent messages, such as Snapchat or Wickr, and 5% use apps that allow people to anonymously chat or post comments, like YikYak or Whisper.

Users are often motivated to use social media platforms for their communal and social offerings. Social platforms easily remove communication and interaction barriers and allow users to communicate and share news with like-minded people. The social networks do even more to attract and engage users in these areas such as new in-app search functions, embedded content and live streaming video. These features (as well as an ever-expanding menu of new ones, along with an emphasis on the mobile experience are important as key platform differentiators in the marketplace.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Omni-channel marketing is a must this holiday season

November 22, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Early holiday indicators demonstrate that marketing to the hyper-connected consumer is necessary. The bar is set high to deliver a compelling, contextual and consistent brand experience across all communication channels. Why is omni-channel marketing so critical this holiday season?

Compared to last year, 6 in 10 consumers report that they will shop only online this holiday season, two-thirds of consumers will shop both online and offline and only 34% will shop mostly in-stores reports Yahoo’s Holiday and Search Insights 2016 report. In all, 37% of consumers said they will shop more online this year than a year ago.

Key findings include:

Holiday shopping is an omni-channel experience

79% of consumers plan to purchase holiday gifts both in store and online

Shoppers are relying more and more on mobile as a “go-to” resource during the busy shopping season

On Black Friday, share of searches on mobile devices increased from 26% year-over-year

While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the busiest shopping days of the year, many will not shop on these designated shopping days

29% of holiday shoppers plan to stay away from shopping during Thanksgiving Week

As brands look to create multichannel promotions, it’s important to maintain their brand authenticity. Brands should stay true to the consumer experience across the multiple marketing channels as a key differentiate in the holiday fury.

Advertising | Industry-Research

In-stream and Sidekick are preferred mobile ad formats

November 16, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Each year the mobile ad industry introduces new creative formats. These formats, both new and old, play an important role in the user’s experience and impact advertising effectiveness. To understand each ad format effect, Kargo, a mobile advertising platform, partnered with MediaScience, a neuroscience research firm, to analyze consumers’ responses to four mobile ad formats through their eye movements, biometric responses and attitudinal changes.

The research found that bigger ad formats are not always better on mobile and In-Stream and Sidekick ad units offer both strong consumer appeal and higher ad effectiveness. Interestingly, while Interstitial ads appear to offer higher brand recognition than Adhesions and Sidekicks, they also over-indexed as disruptive, annoying and intrusive.

Key findings from the study also include:

Adhesion units (adheres to the bottom of the screen and stays with users as they scroll down the page) are viewed as the most common mobile ad unit, and are easily avoided by users. While Adhesions are perceived as less intrusive than Interstitials, they received much less visual attention than all other tested ad formats.
In-Stream units (appears within the stream of editorial content) provide users with the opportunity to focus on mobile ads at their own discretion. In-Stream units perform similarly to Interstitials in visual attention, but outperform them in visual retention. In-Stream units are not thought of as disruptive, annoying, or intrusive.
Interstitial ads (served between content pages) appear to have received the most negative biometric response and negative ad evaluations. They are viewed as disruptive, annoying, intrusive and not well-placed.
Kargo’s Sidekick unit (a silhouette appended to the side of the screen, provides continued visual attention) performed like the other ad formats in visual attention without annoying the user. The Sidekick ad unit, like In-Stream, ranked best among users in terms of overall liking of the ads.

Overall, results of this study suggest that In-Stream and Sidekick units may be the most effective for mobile advertising, among the four ad formats. Both ads hold visual attention and are memorable without the intrusiveness of Interstitials. It’s important to connect both the rational and emotional appeal so the ad attains positive attention and offers users the freedom of managing their environment.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Revenue

Mobile now accounts for almost half of all digital ad revenue

November 9, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Digital advertising revenue increased to $32.7 billion in the first half of 2016, increasing 19% from the same time period a year ago, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Internet Advertising Revenue Report. The shift to mobile advertising was a key driver in the increase of digital ad spend. In fact, mobile advertising revenue totaled $1.6 billion, a 178% increase from the same period in 2015. Mobile advertising now account for 47% of all online ad revenues for the first half of 2016, up from 30% the prior year whereas desktop video ads remained the same at 13% of total revenue.

Among the key trends reported:

Display

Total display-related advertising (mobile + desktop) is up 26% to $13.9 billion and accounts for 43% of all internet ad revenue.
Display-dollars are also shifting to mobile: Mobile display is up 78% to $7.6 billion while desktop display is down 7% to $6.3 billion.

Video

Total digital video ad revenue (mobile + desktop) is up 51% to $3.9 billion.
Video now accounts for 12% of internet ad revenue for the first half of 2016, up from 9% in HY 2015.

Social media

Ad spend on a whole for social media increased to $7 billion, up 57% from one ago.

Other key findings

In terms of pricing models, performance-based pricing, defined as cost-per-click, sale, lead, acquisition, or application (e.g., credit card application) or straight revenue share (e.g., percentage of commission paid upon sale), continues to lead although slightly declined to 65% of total revenue in HY 2016.

CPM/impression-based pricing increased up to 34% of revenues in the first six months of 2016 from 32% in HY 2015.

Hybrid pricing, defined as any mix of impression-based pricing plus performance-based compensation within an ad campaign, declined to 1% of total revenues in HY 2016, down from the 2% reported in HY 2015.

The report also stated that digital ad spending is becoming more concentrated with the top 10 digital ad-selling companies accounting for 74% of online advertising revenues in Q2 2016. The 10 companies were not disclosed in the report.

Many are forecasting that digital advertising will continue to be a larger and larger share of overall revenue generation for businesses. The question is who is capturing the increased profits? In an article in the Financial Times, Anna Nicolaou notes that “Google and Facebook have capitalised on the rise of the smartphone, swallowing the lion’s share of digital advertising revenues. In the US, 85 cents of every new dollar spent on digital went to the two companies in the first quarter of 2016, according to Morgan Stanley.”

Peter Kafta of Recode also offered insight the companies capturing the profit margins. Kafta’s shared the individual analyses done by Jason Kint’s, CEO of Digital Content Next, and Brian Wieser’s, an analyst at Pivotal Research, each illustrating that Google and Facebook account for 85% and 90%, respectively, of every dollar spent on digital. Their analyses also indicated that while Google’s and Facebook’s captured significant growth of ad revenues, the rest of the digital marketplace is diminishing.

Industry-Research

The growing economy of web scraping

November 2, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Web scraping is a technique that allows people to easily extract large amounts of information from around the web – for legal and illegal uses. Distil Networks’ 2016 Economics of Web Scraping Report notes that bots, which make up approximately 46% of web traffic, often conduct the web scraping at a faster rate than humans. The Report found about two percent of online revenue is lost to web scraping.

Key findings also noted in Distil Networks Report:

38% of companies engaged in web scraping to take content.
Web scraping is inexpensive costing about $3.33 per hour.
The average web scraping project costs approximately $135.
Real estate sites are the #1 web scraping target.
The average web scraper salary ranges from $58,000 to $128,000 per year.

There are six primary reasons for web scraping:

Content scraping: stealing original content from one website and posting it on another website without the knowledge or permission from the publisher;
Research: gaining marketplace intelligence;
Contact scraping: acquiring customer emails and contact information for marketing and lead-generation;
Price comparison: competitors in the real estate and travel industries see a lot of this activity;
Weather data monitoring; and
Website change detection: notifying users about changes made to specific websites.

It’s important for publishers to understand the extensive web scraping economy so they can take steps to protect their proprietary information.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Social media revenue trends register mix results

September 28, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Top social media platforms registered strong revenue gains in Q2 2016, however, CPM increases varied according to the Salesforce Advertising Index Report for Q2 2016. Further, growth in mobile usage contributed to an overall increase in mobile’s share of revenue among social media platforms.

Facebook, often referred to as the king of social media, reported $6.4 billion in total revenue with a 59% year-over-year increase and $6.2 billion in ad revenue with a 63% increase year-over-year in Q2 2016. Mobile ad revenue for Facebook accounted for 84% of total ad revenue. Further, Facebook’s global CPM at $6.33 for Q2 2016 increased 65% from a year ago. CPM growth ranked highest in France and Canada at 130% followed by the U.S at 70% year-over-year.

Instagram’s mobile footprint is strong as well. Instagram users identify mobile as their most important device for getting online. In Q2 2016, Instagram’s global CPM registered at $6.30, an increase of 42% quarter-over-quarter.

Twitter reported total revenue of $602 million, a 20% increase year-over-year. Their advertising revenue totaled $535 million, an increase of 18% year-over-year. Twitter’s mobile advertising revenue accounted for 89% of total advertising revenue. Interestingly, while total advertising revenues increased, their global CPM at $4.29 declined by18% compared to a year ago.

LinkedIn’s Global CPM for Q2 2016 was $20.43, a 13% increase year over year. LinkedIn is known as a strong B2B platform with 60% of its total revenue generated from sponsored content.

Social media delivers a large and dedicated audience for advertisers, especially on mobile devices. Just as social networks drive mobile advertising’s growth, mobile drives advertising on social networks. Social media also continues to evolve with the addition of LIVE and VR playground to further build more immersive content and new opportunities to engage consumers.

Industry-Research

Public trust in media drops to an all-time low

September 22, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Consumers’ trust in the media fell to its lowest point this year. Only 32% of consumers said that they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in mass media versus 68% who stated “not very much” or “not at all” reports Gallup Poll Social Series: Governance. While Gallup has seen consumer confidence in media decline in the last 10 years, this year’s findings represent an 8% declined compared to a year ago. Gallup’s survey definition of mass media includes newspapers, television and radio. It is important to note that digital and news and information from the internet were not included in their definition of mass media in the survey.

The collapse in trust is most significant among young and middle-aged adults. Interestingly, those who associate with being a Republican had a more negative view of the media than those who associate with being a Democrat.

In a recent article, The Atlantic offered a few hypotheses as to why consumer trust is declining in media. Their first hypothesis emphasizes the lack of sophisticated journalism in the marketplace. The articles and programs which should inform and provide insightful dialogues are no more than a show and tell of political bantering. Another likely factor that it is an election year. Lack of media trust is cyclical and declines are registered every election year. Media trust fell in 2004, and in 2008, and again in 2012, and now it’s at an all-time low in 2016.

The third possibility could be that public faith in financial, social and political institutions such as the church, the medical system, the presidency, the Supreme Court, banks, big business, and Congress has also fallen this year impacting overall trust scores. The fourth and final hypothesis from The Atlantic is the intense media competition. In an effort to capture consumer attention, there’s more hype than ever before and some journalists are willing to take exaggerate positions on a topic throwing aside their objectivity commitment to remain on neutral grounds. Consumers distrust this type of media behavior.

Still others have suggested the decline in media trust is due to the overwhelming media options including one-sided and sensationalist approaches. As The Washington Post’s Executive Editor Marty Baron stated, “What distinguishes journalism and plain old content, is that we are digging beyond the surface. We are trying to find out why something happened, what are the consequences, who is affected – those deeper issues as opposed to just the bare-bones facts.” As the media landscape has expanded with so much user generated content including blogs, vlogs and social media, the trustworthiness of professional journalism is much harder to find among the clutter—but it has never been more important.

Industry-Research

Why mobile apps are important to a publisher’s digital strategy

September 14, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Mobile usage now represents almost two out of every three digital media minutes as we continue to see more and more consumer usage shift from desktop to mobile. In all, time spent in digital media grew 53% over the past three years, attributed to the surge in usage of mobile apps (+111%) and of mobile web (+62%) reports comScore’s newly released 2016 U.S. Mobile App Report.

Interestingly, the smartphone app is the biggest driver of digital media engagement, resulting in an 80% increase in mobile’s share of time spent over the past three years. However, while the mobile app audience spends more time on apps, comparing users of Top 1000 Apps vs. users of Top 1000 Mobile Web Properties, the mobile web audience is almost three times bigger than the app audience. Intriguingly, almost half of all smartphone users do not download any apps. Among the half of smartphone users that do download apps, they average 3.5 downloads per person per month. Industry experts forecast that by 2017, there will be 268 billion apps downloaded.

It’s difficult to build to build a mobile app audience. However, once the app users are engaged, they are an extremely loyal audience. To illustrate this point, app users spend more than three hours per month on the Top 1000 apps on average whereas mobile web visitors spend less than 10 minutes per month on the Top 1000 web properties. Males 18-44 tend to be the heavy app downloaders with approximately 5 new apps each month.

While all demographics are using their smartphones apps more now, persons 55-64 registered the greatest year-over-year increase at 37%. Further, all U.S. consumers, especially persons 18-24, spend the largest share of their web time on smartphone apps except for adults 65-plus, where screen size mostly likely acts as an inhibitor. In contrast, tablet app usage is down across all demographics.

Facebook and Google are a strong hold in the app marketplace; 7 of the Top 25 apps, based on unique visitors, are owned by these two companies. Of the Top 25 apps, the three leading categories, based on unique visitors, are Utilities (9), Social (6) and Entertainment (6 – tied). Facebook, the largest social platform accounts for 76% of all time spent on social apps. App position on smartphone correlates to usage. Not surprisingly, apps with easy access on the home screen showed strong audience reach. Smartphone users spend approximately 45% of their app time on their #1 most used app, and about 73% on of that time of their Top 3 apps.

Mobile devices are consumers’ constant companions. It’s where audiences are spending most of their time online. Since mobile users are spending more time on their apps, it’s important for digital publishers to continue to develop a platform strategy to attract and transition their large web audiences to loyal app users. Further, as the app market continues to expand “smart” device utilization (think loT like exercise trackers, home and car alarm systems, etc.) expands, it will only become more difficult to break through to the consumer’s screen.

Audiences | Industry-Research

Overall magazine audience grows 6.2%

September 7, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Magazine publications are still growing strong across both print and digital platforms. In fact, in 2015 there were over 7,000 magazines in print, an increase from both five and ten years ago according to the Magazine Media Factbook 2016/17, published by the MPA (The Association of Magazine Media). Just last year, 237 new magazine brands launched. Not only are the number of publications growing but the audience is too. The total gross brand impressions for magazines grew to 1.75 billion across platforms from 1.65 billion in 2014, an increase of 6.2%.

Magazines have a valuable and loyal audience with adults 18+ reading 8.6 magazine issues each month. While the magazine audience skews toward baby boomers and older, the median age at 47.1 years old is similar to users of most traditional media as well as reflective of the U.S. population at 46.8 years old. The digital audience, the core contributor to magazine’s overall multiplatform growth, continues to increase with the total number of adults increasing year-to-year.

Digital magazines have given publishers new ways to experiment with storytelling structures, platforms, formats and revenue streams. Magazines’ digital capabilities are also appealing to a growing audience. Print editions can also be used to offer a unique experience especially for a special edition (e.g. anniversary or a particular event) distinct from what digital magazines can provide. Regardless of platform, magazines must have a distinct brand proposition and identifiable storytelling.

Jens Henneberg Executive Vice President and Editorial Director at Bonnier Publications in the UK comments on the distinct qualities of the print magazine, “Magazines represent the best way to deliver information on paper: they incorporate pictures and graphics in a way that’s more visually engaging than other mediums, while they also use the best printing techniques. This combination of visual and text elements allows magazines to provide the best overview and in-depth knowledge of a topic.” However, the digital platform offers an extension of this format with the ability to include responsive features to interact with the audience and strengthen engagement.

Magazine publishers still face challenges in the marketplace. Google and Facebook, while they drive traffic to digital magazines, also use the content and audience to increase their own ad revenue model. As magazine publishers evaluate the readers experience across their websites, tablet editions and distributed content, they should also assess their extended reach and visibility and audience engagement of their branded experience.

Industry-Research

What news publishers’ risk in social distribution

August 24, 2016 Rande Price, Research VP – DCN

Traffic from Facebook to some of the top news publishers declined at double-digit rates in the second quarter this year according to SimilarWeb’s quarterly web analytics report. SimilarWeb found that Facebook visits to some media companies were down by as much as 50% compared with first quarter metrics.

While some dispute SimilarWeb’s data, other analytic and measurement companies also noted declines in Facebook’s traffic to news sites. One explanation for this decline is the consumer shift from desktop usage to mobile. SimilarWeb is based on desktop only measurement and does not capture the approximately 1.4 billion mobile users accessing Facebook from a mobile device.

Another reason for Facebook’s decline in distributed traffic is due to Facebook’s announcement earlier this year that it was going to emphasize more posts from a user’s family and friends and no longer highlight articles from mainstream media sites. Facebook’s Zuckerberg announced, “Facebook was built on the idea of connecting people with their friends and family. That is still the driving principle of News Feed today. Our top priority is keeping you connected to the people, places and things you want to be connected to — starting with the people you are friends with on Facebook.”

Facebook’s change in sites ranking algorithms likely impacted traffic to news publishers. The consequences to the Facebook announcement can be seen in July’s ranker. Clearly Facebook’s key goal is to keep users on its site longer. That does not necessarily align with providing quality content from branded news publishers.

Similarly, an article from the Columbia Journalism Review, “Facebook is Eating the World,” clearly identifies the publishers’ predicament: “Now the news is filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable.” Publishers are losing control of distribution and increasingly reliant on traffic from social platforms which can be fantastic or deadly to their ad sales business. It’s important for news publishers to build additional businesses and revenues away from distributed platforms. It’s essential for publishers to think in terms of audience engagement measurement rather than scale.