Facebook and the Media Have an Increasingly Landlord-Tenant Style Relationship

SimpleReach, an online analytics company. According to the firm’s latest survey, the top 30 publishers in terms of visibility on Facebook have seen their traffic plummet by more than 30% since the beginning of the year.

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The Huffington Post saw a decline of more than 60%, and BuzzFeed saw its Facebook referrals fall by more than 40%.

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Facebook controls access to its 1.5 billion or so users, and it does this by tweaking the algorithm that determines which updates appear in a particular user’s news feed.

It’s like Facebook not only controls the trucks and satellites and newsstands that supply your newspaper, but also the layout and selection of all the stories that appear inside it.
http://fortune.com/2015/11/09/facebook-media/