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Do you ever feel like the past 1.5 years were a fever dream? One day, we might wake up in 2019 again…
Some publishers already have, but not in a good way.
According to a data analysis by Parsely and Digiday, some publishers’ traffic has fallen to levels they haven’t seen since 2019.
![](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5ec70e28aca2fee918be8426/61265b193de63717b911f133_publisher-traffic-infographic-site-traffic-down-its-not-just-you.png)
Parsely analyzed traffic to sites like Bloomberg, Apartment Therapy, and Medium to get this data — but it’s also relevant to any company pursuing a content strategy.
Traffic trends by the numbers
📉 Overall publisher traffic is down 10% YoY.
📈 Big sites are seeing more traffic this year than in 2019 — especially direct traffic, up 79% from 2019 levels.
📉 Small sites are seeing 27% less traffic than in 2019, and lost 30%+ of their social media referral traffic. The biggest drop? Facebook traffic.
Our takeaway?
Social media platforms — especially Facebook — seem to favor the biggest publishers.
But it’s not all bad news for scrappy content teams: newsletter subscriptions are on the uptick, Digiday reports.