Five Thousand Percent and Facebook Still Won’t Call
In January 2018, Zuckerberg announced a news feed overhaul: posts from friends and family would be prioritized over content from publishers and media pages. The stated goal was more meaningful interaction. The practical effect, for anyone who’d built distribution on Facebook reach, was that the floor dropped out. For this site specifically, the number of people seeing any given post fell to figures so small I could personally drive to each of them and hand-deliver a printed copy.
The panic was immediate. Years of sending readers to Facebook—and watching them stay there, as people do once a platform becomes their default—and now Facebook was quietly burying the return traffic. It felt personal. It probably wasn’t. More likely the algorithm simply noticed that this journal had spent considerable energy writing unflattering things about Facebook, posting too many outbound links, and declining to pay for promoted placement. What Facebook actually wants from a publisher is money. This site wasn’t providing that in sufficient quantities. So.
What happened next was strange. Traffic didn’t drop. It went up. Direct visits to the homepage increased by five thousand percent over those same weeks—people who noticed they weren’t seeing new posts in their feeds apparently did something that now feels almost archaic: they typed a URL. They opened a browser. They came here on purpose.
That’s a different kind of reader. The algorithm-reader is ambient, passive—they absorb content alongside birthday reminders and ads for things they looked at once. The direct reader made a choice. They remembered this site existed, wanted to read something here specifically, and navigated to it. That’s a more honest number than anything Facebook’s analytics ever showed me, because you can’t optimize your way to a direct visit. Someone just decided to show up. That matters more than reach.
The page stays, because the economics of running a site still require a social presence whether you like it or not. But I’ve stopped measuring anything there with any real feeling. The readers who find their own way here are the ones this journal was always for—the ones who wanted it enough to go looking. Facebook can keep the rest.