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Facebook says it will send less traffic to publishers — but that’s already been happening

Google is publishers’ main source of external traffic.

Rani Molla is a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

Facebook’s announcement yesterday that it would be sending less traffic to brands and publishers sent its stock down this morning. But the move has been a long time coming.

Facebook’s share of external web traffic to publishers declined to 24 percent in January, down from nearly 40 percent this time last year, according to new data from Parse.ly, a digital analytics company.

Google, meanwhile, has again become the main source of referral traffic to publishers, with 43 percent coming from the search engine, up from 34 percent at the beginning of 2017.

Facebook versus Google share of publisher referral traffic

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.