BuzzFeed announced to partners that they’ll be turning away from their traffic partner network, powered through the site fre.sh but largely driven through headline modules on BuzzFeed itself. Quartz’s John McDuling explains what its value was to publishers and to BuzzFeed — traffic and data, respectively:

About 200 websites (including, briefly, Quartz) signed up to get traffic from BuzzFeed through its fre.sh website and headline modules on BuzzFeed itself, a program which has been active for about five years. The New Statesman had a good explanation for how the website worked. BuzzFeed would link to the websites of publishers that signed up, in exchange for being able to track information about traffic from those publishers. “BuzzFeed now knows how many of its readers also click around the Daily Mail, and how many of them get their ‘real’ news from the Guardian. All that data pays back back to the site’s native advertising model,” the Statesman wrote.

Though Quartz was a participant, it seems that the loss won’t hit them very hard:

@ceodonovan it was very brief relationship, and my understanding that it did not drive much traffic at all.

— John McDuling (@jmcduling) May 27, 2014

BuzzFeed will now be “shifting the structure of the partner network to a select group of new partners, solely focused around video.”