NEWS ‘FACE’ PLANTS

Hurt by Meta moves

News outlets are experiencing major losses in visitor traffic and hits to their revenue as Facebook and Instagram parent Meta pivots away from the news business, according to a report.

Despite its massive base of more than 3 billion users, Mark Zuckerberg’s (inset) social-media apps accounted for just

33% of overall social-media traffic by page views for major news sites in December, CNBC reported.

That was down from 50% in the same month one year earlier, according to trafficanalytics firm Chartbeat’s analysis of 1,930 media sites provided to the network.

Meta has dialed back on news in the face of a series of troubles, including mounting political scrutiny over a failure to share revenue with media outlets.

Meta also has faced allegations that Facebook and Instagram became hotbeds of election-related misinformation and political bias, as well as lawsuits over their failure to protect young users.

Facebook accounted for just 6% of external trafficreferral volume from socialmedia platforms and search engines in December, down from 14% in the same month in 2018, according to the report’s findings.

One outlet, the political news nonprofit Mother Jones, has reportedly experienced a 99% plunge in traffic from Facebook compared with its peak several years ago.

The site had just 67,000 visitors in December after once hitting as many as 5 million in 2017.

“At this point, it seems pretty clear from the comments that executives at Facebook and Meta made that they have just decided that news is more trouble than it’s worth and that they will show people a fairly minimal amount of it,” Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein told CNBC.

A Meta spokesperson told CNBC that the shift is due to changes in user behavior.

“We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content — they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests,” the spokesperson said. “We’ve made several changes to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most.”

Meta didn’t respond to a request for further comment.