Where Data Tells the Story
© Voronoi 2025. All rights reserved.
Traffic from social networks to news websites has fallen sharply in recent years, and the change feels deeper than a passing shift in algorithms. The open web once thrived on the movement of readers jumping from one platform to another, but that motion has slowed to a crawl. Data from Similarweb shows that in late 2022 the top hundred media outlets were drawing close to 1.75 billion visits a month from social platforms. By mid-2025, that number had slipped near 1.22 billion, and the decline showed little sign of reversing.
Behind that fall lies a change in how platforms define engagement. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have filled their feeds with short videos that keep users scrolling rather than clicking. External links, once central to the feed, now compete against clips that never ask the audience to leave the app. Even LinkedIn and X have adjusted their systems to favor interactions that happen inside their own walls, trimming the reach of posts that send people elsewhere. The result is an internet that feels more enclosed, with each platform building its own loop of activity.
Some attempts to soften the drop have surfaced but none have shifted the trend. X has been testing a link format that lets users react to posts while browsing external pages, trying to make link engagement feel less distant. Instagram has been experimenting with clickable links within posts to help creators lead followers to their sites. These features add convenience but do little to restore the broad traffic pipelines that once connected social media and journalism.
For publishers, the change cuts through their business models. Many built entire audience strategies around the steady referrals once supplied by Facebook and Twitter. As those referrals shrink, even large outlets face weaker ad returns, while smaller ones that depended heavily on social traffic are struggling to stay visible. The loss isn’t just measured in numbers but in how it changes the rhythm of news discovery itself.
Tools like Linktree and Beacons have grown as partial workarounds, giving creators and brands a way to guide followers to multiple destinations. They help maintain a presence across platforms but cannot replace the scale of the old referral systems. What’s emerging is a more self-contained web, where people watch, comment, and react without stepping outside their apps. The click that once led outward has become a less common gesture, and the open web feels further away from where most attention now lives.