Experts say news publishers need to reduce their reliance on Facebook to survive

Press Association (PA) analysis of data from social media analytics company Newswhip has revealed a huge fall in engagements – a combination of reactions, comments and shares – on website content for many of the UK’s biggest news websites towards the end of 2017. In this respect, experts have warned that news publishers will need to reduce their reliance on Facebook to survive, as figures show a dramatic drop in interactions with their content on the platform during the course of last year. Seven out of eight UK news publishers analysed by PA saw year-on-year falls in both total and average engagements with content on their sites in December 2017.

In the survey, combined, total engagements with content from the eight websites were down 27.6 percent over the same period. Among these were the top three performing sites in the UK: bbc.co.uk saw total engagements down 22 percent compared with December 2016, with the dailymail.co.uk down 42 per cent and independent.co.uk down 47 per cent. According to the figures, Facebook provided nearly 40 per cent of traffic from web publishers in January 2017, but this fell to 26 per cent by the end of November.