• Fellowships
  • Reports
  • Lab
  • Storyboard
    • Nieman Foundation at Harvard
    HOME
    About
    Subscribe
    Archives
              
    Foundation
    Reports
    Storyboard
    LATEST STORY
    Journalism scholars want to make journalism better. They’re not quite sure how.
    Business Models Mobile & Apps Audience & Social Aggregation & Discovery Reporting & Production
    ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
    Oct. 7, 2021, 1:34 p.m.
    When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up
    LINK: twitter.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen   |   October 7, 2021

    On August 3, 2018, Facebook went down for 45 minutes. That’s a little baby outage compared to the one this week, when, on October 4, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for more than five hours. Three years ago, the 45-minute Facebook break was enough to get people to go read news elsewhere, Chartbeat‘s Josh Schwartz wrote for us at the time.

    So what happened this time around? For a whopping five-hours-plus, people read news, according to data Chartbeat gave us this week from its thousands of publisher clients across 60 countries.. (And they went to Twitter; Chartbeat saw Twitter traffic up 72%. If Bad Art Friend had been published on the same day as the Facebook outage, Twitter would have literally exploded, presumably.)

    At the peak of the outage — around 3 p.m. ET — net traffic to pages across the web was up by 38% compared to the same time the previous week, Chartbeat found.

    By the way, here’s how Chartbeat defines direct traffic and dark social, from CMO Jill Nicholson.

    And here’s a question a bunch of people had. We’ll update this post when we know!

    Show tags
     
    What’s the best way to follow how the news is changing?
    Our daily email, with all the freshest future-of-journalism news.
    Prefer a once-a-week email? »
    The latest from Nieman Lab
    Journalism scholars want to make journalism better. They’re not quite sure how.
    Jacob L. Nelson
    Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars
    Matthew Jordan
    Going back to the well: CNN.com, the most popular news site in the U.S., is putting up a paywall
    Joshua Benton
    The New York Times redesigns its app to highlight a universe beyond just news
    Neel Dhanesha
    You might discover a conspiracy theory on social media — but you’re more likely to believe it if you hear it from a friend
    Joshua Benton
    Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
    Journalism scholars want to make journalism better. They’re not quite sure how.
    Does any of this work actually matter?
    Congress fights to keep AM radio in cars
    The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act is being deliberated in both houses of Congress.
    Going back to the well: CNN.com, the most popular news site in the U.S., is putting up a paywall
    It has a much better chance of success than CNN+ ever did. But it still has to convince people its work is distinctive enough to break out the credit card.
    Help advance the Nieman Foundation’s mission “to promote and elevate the standards of journalism” by making a donation.

    To promote and elevate the standards of journalism

    Covering thought leadership in journalism

    Pushing to the future of journalism

    Exploring the art and craft of story
    © 2024 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College  /  Some rights reserved
    Harvard Trademark Privacy Digital Accessibility
    Walter Lippmann House    One Francis Ave.    Cambridge, MA 02138    617 495 2237