[Laura Hazard Owen at NiemanLab]

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%.

But the focus is this:

"Search traffic, still dominated by Google search, has remained relatively steady during the period, Brad Streicher, sales director at Chartbeat, said in a panel at the Online News Association’s annual conference in Atlanta last week. Google Discover — the Google product offering personalized content recommendations via Google’s mobile apps — is increasingly becoming a top referrer, up 13% across Chartbeat clients since January 2023."

I think what's particularly notable here is the shift between kind of product. Google Search, despite the black box nature of its ever-changing algorithm, always felt like it was a part of the open web.

Discover, on the other hand, is an algorithmic recommendation product that tries to proactively give users more of what they want to read. It's much more akin to a Facebook newsfeed than it is a search index. There are likely editors behind the scenes, and a human touch to what gets surfaced. Publishers are even more in the dark about how to show up there than they were about how to rise through search engine rankings.

I'm curious about what this means for the web. Is this just an advertising / walled garden play from a company that wants to maximize advertising revenue and time on platform? Or is it a reflection of the web getting too big and too messy for many users, creating the need for a firmer hand to show them where the good content is? Is it a function of increased skittishness about an open web that might publish content and ideas that aren't brand safe? Or is it just changing user behavior in light of other apps?

Perhaps some elements of all of the above?

#Media

[Link]