Did you know Meta’s Recent Change in Approach to Political Content Sees 74% Rise in Referral Traffic 

Meta’s recent altered approach to political content is doing the platform justice, as new stats showed a 74% YoY rise in referral traffic. And these are coming from some of the largest publisher platforms.

As per the latest analysis on this front that was produced by Similarweb, the new approach to political and news domains opened up another key area to be explored regarding referral traffic. This might do great for those wanting to make use of the app to get greater engagement.

The total desktop share arising from Facebook alone rose to 75% from some of the largest news pages in the world last month. Meanwhile, social referrals across desktops and mobile web traffic rose YoY at 48% of the 68 pages. As shown in the chart, Facebook’s traffic has fallen significantly from what it was in the year 2022 for large publisher pages.

Meta started to explore the restrictions on topics like politics in 2021, depending to the rising political polarization. It also took into consideration feedback from users who spoke about feeds getting flooded with politics and anger. Users were not happy to see the negativity spread on social media and voiced their opinions against it.

Meanwhile, many governments also chose to roll out revenue-sharing programs that force the company to pay local publishing houses for news shared through their apps. Seeing the rise in AI-based Reels, more relevant to entertainment than news, Meta saw this as a great chance to separate itself from political antics completely, as the best solution.

This meant the platform had to limit recommendations for politics by a huge amount, and it gave rise to active limitations of all political posts across different apps that also reduced referral traffic.

As per Meta’s new report, most of the views on Facebook posts across the US during Q4 didn’t entail any link to sources outside of the Facebook platform. This is up from 86.5% from Q3 of 2921, which is huge. It’s a mega impact on the bigger digital ecosystem. For now, things are really moving in a great direction upward. We might be seeing Facebook drive more traffic to sites again.

We are not sure if the trend might impact other sites and links, or if Meta is only allowing certain sites and publishers to get more referrals with links. However, this information is proof that while some big news pages have witnessed big gains, others have not. It could be that some discussions could see a massive rise as a result of the company’s refocus.

It’s definitely something to look forward to, and it might help to add greater focus on Facebook with time as the lead source for Traffic generation. Today, there are more than 3 billion users, and that could be of great value if Meta enables link posts to get great reach over time again.