Subscribe

Facebook social reader figures nosedive

Kathryn McConnachie
By Kathryn McConnachie, Digital Media Editor at ITWeb.
Johannesburg, 09 May 2012

The controversial “social reader” applications, which automatically posted what people were reading to their friends' news feeds on Facebook, are not fairing very well when it comes to user numbers.

Major publications such as The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and Mashable were some of the first news publishers to embrace the feature on Facebook.

Data from independent traffic tracker, App Data, however, shows that, during the month of April, active user numbers dropped dramatically almost across the board for social reader apps. The Washington Post, in particular, showed dismal numbers, with a drop from 17.4 million to 9.2 million users in the past month.

The decline in active users has been explained by some as a result of Facebook's alteration to the way in which it features social reader stories in news feeds. In a response to a query from Poynter, App Data spokesperson Bonnie Ho is quoted as saying: “Facebook is constantly testing how social readers/open-graph-enabled apps appear and how much distribution they get in the news feed.

“This may impact the active user counts for all social reading apps. For example, it recently started grouping social reader stories in a 'trending articles' aggregation. Despite the testing, we have no exact indication of the impact it had on the data.”

Facebook had previously featured a box with 'recently read' articles in the news feed; however, since the feature has been changed to only 'trending articles', fewer stories are displayed, thus reducing the number of click-throughs.

According to App Data, it is possible that the social readers peaked in growth as users were testing the new service - many may not have wanted to continue using it, so now decline in user numbers is actually the levelling out of the spike.

TechCrunch's Josh Constine argues the fluctuation in user numbers is not so much a reflection on the apps themselves, but on how Facebook has complete control over what apps and content types receive traffic from the news feed, depending on how it chooses to display it.

Split opinion

Inside Facebook says it conducted its own analysis of monthly and daily active user data and has concluded that social reader apps are not “collapsing”, but that there is rather no single trend affecting the apps in the same way.

“The Huffington Post's Web and mobile integration, for example, continues to steadily gain new monthly active users. The Washington Post Social Reader, a canvas application with a mobile component, has seen a decline over the past month,” notes Inside Facebook.

Despite the confusion surrounding the data, some still maintain the recent decline is a reflection on the general dislike of the 'social reader' concept and the invasiveness of frictionless-sharing. The general sentiment on social networks echoes this. Some top tweets include:

“I will not click on links because of WaPo Social Reader. If it weren't for that app, I would read more WaPo stories.”

“I'm totally uninterested in defences of social reader apps. They do the manifestly wrong thing. Let them die.”

“Love when people get owned on FB by the WaPo Social Reader app. A nice (embarrassing) selection of articles people are reading these days.”

“Dear @washingtonpost: Everyone hates your Social Reader. Asking people to fiddle with their FB setting to read your stories is a bad idea.”

Related story:
Facebook: rethought

Share