Facebook has announced it is going to change its algorithm to de-emphasize news in favour of posts by users family and friends.

Facebook engineering director Lars Backstrom said, “We anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages”.

Peter Longo, CEO of US Media for IDG Communications, comments, “The amount of traffic that Facebook and Google are referring is up to 75 per cent, and that’s up 52 per cent from four years ago. It’s kind of like Facebook and Google are the parters you love to hate. They’re doing such tremendous work for publishers in many regards, so any tweak to their algorithm necessarily makes people nervous”.

“Most publishers are not sold out these days, and what’s important is that you’re monetising all of the traffic that you get, in every way possible... It’s important to have multiple hooks into the revenue and profit realm if you’re going to take advantage of all of that traffic... but not every publisher is there yet.”

“You have to live in the ecosystem you publish in,” Longo said. “Like it or not, there was a world dominated by a lot of publishers’ websites that was transformed by search, and transformed again by the growth of social platforms. You can’t pretend that didn’t exist, you have to make the most of it as we continue to change.”