Confirming the influential role that Facebook plays in driving traffic to content-oriented websites, statistics gathered during a recent outage showed a decline in traffic as users had to find something else to do for a few minutes.
Chartbeat, which provides real-time analytics for web publishers, found that overall traffic on news sites fell 3% during the outage, which started at about noon Eastern time and lasted less than an hour. Entrances to news sites from mobile devices fell 8.5% during the downtime, according to Chartbeat, re-confirming Facebook’s major role in driving mobile traffic to online publishers.
In better news for publishers, it turns out that consumers simply fired up their computers and went straight to the home pages for major news sites to stay informed for that brief period of time.
