Facebook has updated its algorithm which will place more importance to posts from friends and family rather than from content publishers. This means that posts from some Pages will get lesser referral traffic which could affect distribution for many media companies... badly. Analytics and content optimization company Parse.ly says that Facebook now accounts for 39% of referral traffic and even pulled ahead of Google from its network of nearly 400 digital publishers. Factordaily had pointed that Indian news sites had lost 100 million page views last month due to tweaks made to Facebook's algorithm. This move has more ramifications from just a decline in the number of pageviews to website. Facebook's echo chamber is only going to get louder and divergent points of views will not get as much attention on the News feed. Facebook says that Pages should "post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends" else lose traffic coming to their website. For example, if a lot of your referral traffic is the result of people sharing your content and their friends liking and commenting on it, there will be less of an impact than if the majority of your traffic comes directly through Page posts. We encourage Pages to post things that their audience are likely to share with their friends. Publishers will probably have to pay Facebook to make sure that their stories come on News Feeds unless friends and family link to it, as indicated by this Wired report. This is likely to reinforce biases…
