There are some interesting referral statistics embedded in this piece. Facebook referral traffic has fallen more than 40% over the last year; referrals from Reddit have increased by 88%. #Mediawerd.io/2024/google-discover-i…
It's remarkable what a force Google Discover has become, while Google search slowly shrinks for many publishers. One theory I like is that Google is throwing publishers a bone with Discover traffic, while they take away search traffic via AI Overviews. But as the Niemen article notes, Discover is much more of a black box algorithm — there are few ways to optimize for it. And yes, social drives no traffic these days; all the main centralized platforms de-emphasize links now.
And even the open social platforms often strip referrers and utm tags, so nobody knows how if traffic comes from there. (Still Mastodon's biggest own-goal imo.)
I agree re: Discover counterbalancing search. It's such a shift towards the curated and sanitized, alongside the black box nature of it. I don't think it'll end well.
Even if we didn't set Referrer-Policy deliberately, a lot of our activity happens in native mobile apps that wouldn't send a Referer header anyway. And even if we got it all working, you'd have no way to group it all under "fediverse", it'd just be thousands of individual domains... I don't see what we can do here.
Richard MacManus
in reply to Ben Werdmuller • • •Ben Werdmuller
in reply to Richard MacManus • • •And even the open social platforms often strip referrers and utm tags, so nobody knows how if traffic comes from there. (Still Mastodon's biggest own-goal imo.)
I agree re: Discover counterbalancing search. It's such a shift towards the curated and sanitized, alongside the black box nature of it. I don't think it'll end well.
Eugen Rochko
in reply to Ben Werdmuller • • •ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)
in reply to Eugen Rochko • • •