search engine tech giant Google has beaten social engine tech giant Facebook to become number one publishers’ main source of
search engine tech giant Google has beaten social engine tech giant Facebook to become number one publishers’ main source of external page views over the course of 2017, a new data showed.
Google used to be the main source of referral traffic for website publishers in 2017. Then Facebook eclipsed it, ReCode
reported According to digital analytics company Parse.ly, Google sent more traffic than Facebook to publishers Facebook sent
25 percent less traffic to publishers in 2017, while Google increased its traffic by 17 percent.
In 2017 starting week of January January, Facebook provided nearly 40 percent of publishers’ external traffic which is now
down to 26 percent.Google, which started the year at 34 per cent, generated 44 percent of the total traffic. Parse.ly pointed out a number of
factors for this turnaround.
In 2016 Facebook changed its algorithm to prioritise posts from friends and family over publishers. Also, Facebook’s “Instant
Articles” feature, where the service hosted some publishers’ content directly but promised to send more readers to the
original site as well, has declined in importance, the analytics company found.
Since users can now publish videos directly on Facebook, this might have affected how many links to web stories publishers
put on their Facebook pages. Google’s “accelerated mobile pages” (AMP) feature, which also hosts publishers’ content directly
on Google’s servers, became more important over the year. AMP stories – typically from news publishers – are surfaced at the
top of mobile search results as “Top Stories,” which drives clicks.