This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here.
When it comes to website traffic, encouraging trends are few and far between.
The overwhelming pattern is one of erosion, with answer engines, social media, and news avoidance leading to systemic declines in digital audience for the vast majority of publishers.
That is why, when working with the measurement firm Chartbeat on an unrelated story, I found myself genuinely surprised to find a heartening trend in a tranche of audience data.
The discovery began with the chart below, which captures the bleak nature of digital readership across the web. The data represented in the graphic, as with the rest in this article, comes from an anonymized cohort of 535 U.S. and U.K. publishers that have consented to sharing it with Chartbeat for research purposes.
The portrait it captures is one of search traffic that has declined gradually and then suddenly. Last April, audience from both Google Search and Google Discover began to drop, and neither has really stopped since. Search has nosedived more precipitously than Discover, but both are at their lowest point in years.
(The timeframe begins in 2023 only because that was the first time Chartbeat was able to decouple Search traffic from Discover traffic and measure them independently.)
Naturally, my first instinct after seeing this data was to place it into a broader context, so I asked the Chartbeat team to share figures that reflect how important Search traffic is to publishers as a source of traffic overall. That is when the surprise appeared.
In the chart below, search traffic is shown in orange. It had been relatively stable since 2019, before beginning its dramatic drop last summer. It is now the smallest of the five groupings that Chartbeat uses to categorize its traffic.
The grouping themselves are relatively self-explanatory: Social is traffic from social platforms; Internal is recirculation traffic, which occurs when someone moves from one web page to another on the same website; Direct is people visiting the home page of a website, and Search is from search platforms like Google, but also Bing or DuckDuckGo.
As you can see, one source of traffic, External, represented in the green, has risen somewhat impressively since 2019. In fact, behind Internal traffic, External is now the second-largest source of traffic for publishers, according to Chartbeat.
