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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%. #Media https://werd.io/2024/google-discover-is-sending-us-news-publishers-much-more-traffic
#Media
in reply to Ben Werdmuller

Richard MacManus
Richard MacManus
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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.
in reply to Richard MacManus

Ben Werdmuller
Ben Werdmuller
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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.

in reply to Ben Werdmuller

Eugen Rochko
Eugen Rochko
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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.

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