Facebook's Traffic Faucet
Big discussion yesterday over Facebook’s traffic faucet and the sudden decline in monthly actives for social reader apps.
Josh Constine:
No, Facebook news reader apps aren’t declining because users suddenly got fed up with auto-sharing. The user loss is likely due to the transition to “trending articles”, a new way of surfacing recently read articles in the news feed that Facebook is testing.
It’s a valid point — users don’t just flee all at once, as the Washington Post Social Reader AppData graph may have shown.
But in a way, it’s possible the user loss can be tied to negative user sentiment. Facebook wouldn’t change the News Feed if the social reader apps were actually interesting and/or driving interaction. Perhaps Facebook saw a trend that most users viewed these as too noisy or too spammy for their feeds, then implemented a News Feed change.
Either way, it’s bad news for any company looking to build a product that relies upon Facebook interactions. It’s a (harsh?) reminder that Facebook is in full control of what gets into the News Feed, so entrepreneurs building social applications should be warned.
