Growth Marketing
•

Site Traffic Down? It’s Not Just You.

Kelsey Donk
•
August 24, 2021
Site Traffic Down? It’s Not Just You.
Table of Contents
  1. Template item

This is an excerpt from MarketerHire's weekly newsletter, Raisin Bread. To get a tasty marketing snack in your inbox every week, subscribe here.

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.

Source: Digiday

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.

Kelsey DonkKelsey Donk
Kelsey Donk is a writer at MarketerHire. Before joining MarketerHire full-time, Kelsey was a freelance writer and loved working with small businesses to level up their content. When she isn't writing, Kelsey can be found gardening or walking her dogs all around Minneapolis.
Hire Marketers
Explainers

Site Traffic Down? It’s Not Just You.

September 8, 2023
August 24, 2021
Kelsey Donk

Big sites saw YoY shrinkage in mid-2021 — and meanwhile, some small sites saw traffic dips so big, it put their traffic behind where it was in 2019. Why?

Table of Contents

This is an excerpt from MarketerHire's weekly newsletter, Raisin Bread. To get a tasty marketing snack in your inbox every week, subscribe here.

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.

Source: Digiday

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.

Kelsey Donk
about the author

Kelsey Donk is a writer at MarketerHire. Before joining MarketerHire full-time, Kelsey was a freelance writer and loved working with small businesses to level up their content. When she isn't writing, Kelsey can be found gardening or walking her dogs all around Minneapolis.

Hire a Marketer