Late last week, Facebook confirmed that it would be downgrading posts from Pages in its News Feeds, in favor of “more genuine” posts from friends. The announcement sent Facebook stock tumbling and cost CEO Mark Zuckerberg $4 billion personally. But, in fact, the decline in traffic delivered to page publishers, like musicians, labels and brands, has already begun.
Facebook’s share of web traffic sent to publishers is already down 24%, so far in January; and down 40% from this time last year, according to new data shared by analytics company Parse.ly.