"What happens when Facebook goes down? People read the news"

From Chartbeat:

What would the world look like without Facebook? Chartbeat had a glimpse into that on Aug. 3, 2018, when Facebook went down for 45 minutes and traffic patterns across the web changed in an instant. What did people do? According to our data, they went directly to publishers’ mobile apps and sites (as well as to search engines) to get their information fix.  This window into consumer behavior reflects broader changes we see taking hold this year around content discovery, particularly on mobile. This is good news for publishers.

Traffic Trends Reverse
Despite volatility driven by algorithm shifts and intense news cycles, user demand for content (represented by traffic across the web) is quite stable. But the sources of that traffic are anything but static. In fact, we’ve seen a major reversal in the specific sources driving traffic to publisher sites in the last year.

Key shifts:

• Mobile traffic has seen double-digit growth and surpassed desktop, which saw double-digit declines.
• On mobile, Facebook is down nearly 40% since January 2017, while Google Search has seen a 2x growth in that same time period. That means increases in Google Search referral traffic have more than offset any declines in Facebook referral traffic.
• Additionally — and of significant importance — mobile direct traffic to publishers is now greater than traffic sent by Facebook to publishers’ sites. This means consumers are now more likely to get their news by typing in a publisher URL or opening an app than by being referred through Facebook.

Mobile Content Discovery Apps Broaden
We’ve also observed content discovery habits changing, as “built-in” mobile aggregators emerge as meaningful referrers. While traffic driven by more traditional referrers like Yahoo, Twitter, and Outbrain has stayed roughly constant for the last 18 months, news aggregator apps that are built directly into the mobile phone or browser experience are now driving significant traffic to publishers. These apps have seen incredible growth:

• Google Chrome Suggestions, a personalized newsfeed built into Chrome’s mobile browser, is up 20x.
• News aggregator Flipboard is up 2x in the past year.
• The new Google News app, which is pre-installed on Android devices, is up roughly 3x since it relaunched in May.

Built-in portal apps aren’t the only apps to watch; publisher-owned news apps are also making a comeback. According to the Digital News Report 2017 from Reuters Institute, weekly use of news apps in the U.S. was up roughly 40% in 2017. And Chartbeat data shows that app users are not just consuming more content, but they are also an incredibly loyal audience – 5.7x more loyal on average than visitors who arrive from platforms like Facebook and Google.

All of which makes the Aug. 3 Facebook incident even more interesting to observe....

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