As Facebook crashes, news sites start

It’s unbelievable how Facebook and its applications and services are reducing traffic to other, mostly news, websites. This is most evident during outages, which are affected from time to time by social networks.

Five hours and 38%

Measuring the increase in competition, if you can define Twitter in this way, and also other, especially news sites, is measured during short outages of Facebook and its services. It’s extremely interesting and then we can realize that Classic web portals that have news are direct reading on the sidelines. They, too, had to adapt and go the way of spreading their articles via Facebook. When Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp dropped out a few days ago, on October 4, an interesting phenomenon occurred.

The first to respond were news sites, because people want to have information about what is happening in their country and the world, so logically followed byriama visit the site they follow via facebook. This behavior during Facebook’s five hours of inactivity led to a 38% increase in direct website visits. The Chartbeat chart shows exactly how the increase increased at 15:00 and the green line indicating direct site visits goes up sharply. After the situation calms down and the social space is re-thrown, everything returns to its normal rhythm. In this example, it is quite obvious how most people take data via Facebook, and all media that simply have to use it are so dependent on this communication channel. Behavior was monitored by Chartbeat in 60 countries around the world. Something similar happened in 2018, when Facebook dropped out for only 45 minutes, and even this short time was enough for people to immediately start opening their favorite sites in the browser.

And the second winner of the outage is, of course, the competition. Twitter immediately started moving forward and once you have its application on your phone, Facebook doesn’t work, so it’s an alternative. The increase in this service was up to 72% during the period of non-functioning of Facebook services. Again, as with reading the news live, once Facebook returned to the online world, there was a wave of interest in Twitter.

From this story, it is quite obvious how big a mass of the planet Facebook controls, just because we used to watch everything in one place, communicate with friends, sell things and just be in the action through its channels. In particular, content creators have shown how real their complaints are when they argue that they are the ones who actually make sense to Facebook (at least in part) and do not yet get what they want from advertising revenue. However, Google, for example, has the same identity. However, the change has long been talked about, but the solution or agreement on it and its implementation in practice is absent.