That’s what Josh Awtry, svp of audience development at Newsweek, told Digiday after last Wednesday, when the publisher saw the most social referral traffic to its site on a single day in five years.
Newsweek’s social referrals from all platforms are up almost 10 times compared to the average day in March last year, Awtry said. Social made up less than 3% of Newsweek’s traffic mix at this time a year ago. But this month, social referral traffic has more than doubled as a percentage of the overall referral mix — and close to tripled over the past week, according to Awtry.
Newsweek’s referral traffic from Threads has surged 20-fold since January. Before then it had been just a few thousand daily page views, he said. Threads now drives more traffic for the publisher than X, despite it having a fraction of the follower count on the former — Newsweek has 3.5 million followers on X compared to 160,000 followers on Threads, which Meta launched in July 2023. Engagement on Threads has also increased, he added.
So what’s driving all of this? Meta-owned platforms. Yes, you read that right. Meta hasn’t exactly been a best friend to publishers lately (or even just an acquaintance). Meta has pretty much turned its back on publishers — shutting down its News tab last year, removing Instant Articles in 2023 and overhauling its algorithm in 2018 to de-prioritize content shared by publishers (and essentially tanking their Facebook referral traffic).
But Meta announced it would start getting friendlier with publishers this past January, specifically those publishing political news. In 2021, Meta decided to reduce the visibility of posts about elections, politics and social issues, but since the beginning of this year, that content has been phased back into Meta’s social feeds.
Historically, Newsweek has generated “very little” readership from Threads, Awtry said. But since Meta’s January announcement, the publisher started posting more often on the platform — up to multiple times an hour.
Meta has recently added new features to Threads that help users control and personalize their experiences, such as adding topics to bios and improved topic tagging, according to an update from the company last week. It noted that posts with tagged topics receive more views. Meta plans to announce more features, which it claims will be useful for publishers on Threads, according to a spokesperson.
Newsweek isn’t the only publisher experiencing these gains. Politico had the most referrals from Threads to date in February. March referrals are up almost 50% month over month, according to a spokesperson from the publisher.
Forbes started putting a lot more effort into Threads and posting more as its stories began gaining traffic in January, and, as a result, referral traffic is now up 711% year to date, according to Kerry Lauerman, executive editor at Forbes. Forbes now posts on the platform at least once an hour, more than double what the publisher was posting in December, Lauerman said.
And that’s where the “chicken and the egg” situation comes in, according to an executive at another publisher, who asked to speak anonymously. They said their referral traffic on Threads was up 677% month over month at the beginning of March. This publisher started seeing more referral traffic coming from Threads in January and upped its posts on the platform. Now it posts on Threads hundreds of times a day.
“There are so few places that right now we’re seeing that sort of acceleration in referrals,” the exec added. Threads is now bringing in more referral traffic than channels like Reddit and MSN, and is on par with platforms like NewsNow, NewsBreak and Bing, according to the exec.
The executives interviewed for this story said they’re seeing a range of topics and post types perform well on Threads — including images and link posts that span across a variety of coverage areas, including news and entertainment.
For what it’s worth, Threads is making big gains in monthly active app users. Threads had 46.5 million monthly active app users in the U.S. in February, up 143% year over year, according to Similarweb data. (X had 56.2 million.) Meta said in January that Threads had more than 320 million monthly active users.
Chartbeat data also shows that, on average, Threads referral traffic to publishers has doubled in the past six months. But it still makes up less than 1% of referral traffic for publishers in aggregate.
But not all publishers have seen a bump in referral traffic from Threads — not even all news publishers. Publishers like The Guardian, The Boston Globe and three other news organizations that asked not to be named said they hadn’t seen any major shifts in Threads referral traffic.
The jury’s still out on how meaningful this traffic is to publishers’ overall audience ambitions and revenue. Referrals from Threads remain a tiny portion of publishers’ overall traffic — even if the channel is growing. Social makes up less than 10% of Newsweek’s overall referral traffic, Awtry said. The anonymous publishing exec said Threads referrals are just a single-digit share of its overall referral traffic mix.
While traffic spikes help bring in more readers to publishers’ sites (though let’s face it, they will likely be short-lived once there’s another inevitable algorithm tweak), they’re unlikely to excite too many chief commercial officers focused on daily audience in terms of how much digital ad revenue they’ll actually bring in.
“Threads remains small compared to other sources, so growth should be viewed within that context. As such, we will continue to monitor growth, and experiment accordingly,” the Politico spokesperson said.
One thing is clear: The time when publishers could rely on continuous traffic surges from Meta referrals is over. But those who are seeing lifts from Threads are happy to ride the current wave, no matter how long it lasts. Despite these improvements in referral traffic from Meta’s platforms (for some), none of those interviewed for this story said they would be pouring resources into Threads to keep the momentum going.
“The goal is ultimately to bring more discussion back to our own channels. We are going to lean hard into Threads as a page view driver but I also don’t want to fall into the same traps that we all fell into in 2018,” Awtry said. “If we’re going to invest more resources or grow our social team’s presence, it’s going to be around engagement on our own channels.”
https://digiday.com/?p=572892
