Facebook’s new algorithm changes might kill small publishers altogether

Facebook is going to test a major change that will affect pages of media outlets very badly.

Facebook plans to hide posts from media outlets from the main feed. Yes, the news from publishers will not appear in the main feed and Facebook will have another parallel feed to move all the news updates there. News publishers will have to pay to be visible in the primary News Feed, otherwise, their posts will be buried in a separate tab called “Explore”.

Facebook is currently testing this change in six countries. Facebook claims to have no plan to roll this test out globally. But since the social giant is testing this feature it is expected that some version of it will be made available to all Facebook users in the world.

Facebook might rethink of implementing a similar change more widely if users prefer their News Feed just be posts from friends.

In this newly launched Explore Feed that will show posts and pages, you don’t follow, Events, Groups, Saved items and Moments can also be viewed.

The test is currently active for Facebook users in Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia. In these countries, Facebook has removed all posts published on Facebook Pages from the main News Feed and moved them to a separate and less prominent “Explore” section in its app.

Facebook’s head of News Feed, Adam Mosseri, said in a company blog post,

“The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content. We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it’s an idea worth pursuing any further.”

Most of the media outlets and news publishers depend upon Facebook as a major source of generating traffic for their websites or any other online platform. Apart from Google’s Search Engine, Facebook’s algorithms are the reason that Facebook has become a basic need for every digital outlet to boost their content.

The test has already lowered the traffic in the countries where it is active. Many pages of companies are seeing dramatical drop down in their organic reach.

Facebook is getting harsh with its organic reach policies. The page content reach is dropping with each passing day. Publishers are, as a result, are forced to pay to get the reach they want.