Facebook Killed the Viral Star: Upworthy's Traffic Plummets After News Feed Tweaks

Upworthy’s traffic dropped from 90 million in November to 48 million in January.

upworthy viral facebook

Just when it seemed BuzzFeed was changing the way the world consumes news, Facebook threw a one-two punch.

Around the same time Facebook made its News Feed tweaks to focus on “high quality” content, BuzzFeed hired a number of investigative journalists — as well as political and foreign reporters — to supplement the site’s unserious journalism, most famously the listicles and cat GIFs. A number of other sites like Business Insider, Slate and the Atlantic are still benefiting from Facebook traffic.

But viral publishers like Upworthy, ViralNova, Elite Daily and Distractify saw steep declines in traffic after Facebook’s algorithm change in December.

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