(Almost) A year on: how did we fare in times of "post-algorithm"?

Prediction season is dawning on us, and I was recently asked in conference in Kiev (the first #SMW to take place in Ukraine) what I thought was the future of social media.

I left my crystal ball in back in London… But it made me think about where we, news folks, were this time in 2017, preparing for the “worst”. And how doomsday prophets seemed to have been proven right straightaway, when in January 2018 Facebook announced it was going to reduce the number of news that people would see in their Newsfeeds.

Some of my favourite headlines from back then:

Well, it has been more than ten months since that. For the lack of clairvoyance in interpreting the leaves at the bottom of a tea cup or reading the tarot, let’s chew up on some numbers from the recent past.

First, there is the referrals. Ametrtric that, for various reasons, tends to make the headlines. Cue melancholy music...

Once upon a time, in land far away, the birds chirped, the rainbow crossed the skies, and Facebook was the promised land: up and up it went, bringing traffic back to websites, until one day, in April 2015, it became the biggest source of it all.

But then, that doomed year of 2016, things started to change. Facebook was looking for "love" back among friends and families.

The circumstances of Donald Trump's election as president of the United States complicated things further. Click-bait started to look like a walk in the park as compared to what the "fake news" phenomenon would become.

2017 went by with more changes to the Newsfeed de-prioritising low quality posting, and January 2018 saw less news in the Newsfeed, and the birth of the "meaningful interaction" catchphrase. From there on, Facebook made the headlines for so many reasons, and with so many implications, that it is probably fair to say that the platform won't look back to the current year "with undiluted pleasure" (to quote Queen Elizabeth II 1992's annus horribilis speech).

Of course the social media universe is much bigger than just Facebook, and the question I was posed was about the future of social media. But it so happens that it is still the biggest social platform in the world. And the biggest when it comes to consuming news. So, let's continue our narrative and looked at what happened with the hard numbers.

First, the ever so slippery referrals.

Different analysis have shown that results varied from publisher to publisher, but this chart by Parse.ly, containing data from their network of media organisations gives some indication that, if anything, Facebookggedon did not happen.

But there is another way of assessing impact, that sometimes gets overlooked: engagement. Let's take a look at the top 25 publishers by Newswhip:

"The research actually shows that the news publishers actually benefited from the decluttering of the NewsFeed", noted The Drum.

"There have definitely been winners in this space, and ones who didn’t quite survive the algorithm shift", said Newswhip.

Our own experience at BBC World Service Languages has been that of a positive trend over the last ten months. But after feeling as if we were all put on the edge of a cliff, what do you with with these numbers? Where do we stand in the "post-algorithm" era?

I will be writing about we have done about them soon.

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