(Bloomberg) — Facebook Inc. will make changes to its News Feed rankings, highlighting posts from friends and family over those from publishers and brand pages that users have "liked."
The company said it's making adjustments after receiving feedback from users who complained that they sometimes miss important updates from the people closest to them. The changes will penalize some online publishers that rely on traffic from people who follow their pages.
Corporate pages on Facebook may see a decline in the number of people who see their content and in referral traffic to links they post, according to a company blog post. Facebook said links shared by its 1.65 billion users on their personal profiles can continue to go viral and reach large audiences.
Facebook has drawn media companies and brands to create pages on the social network in recent years by offering exposure to huge groups of people. For example, BuzzFeed posts dozens of links a day to the 7.4 million people who "like" its page on Facebook. CNN, with 22 million followers, and The New York Times, with 11 million, also update their pages frequently throughout the day.
"We appreciate Facebook's transparency and we intend to closely monitor this situation," Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said in a statement. "We very much value our audience on Facebook. Still, while we are not yet in a position to forecast exactly what the change will mean to us, our subscription model and levels of direct traffic make us less dependent on Facebook than some other publishers."
CNN said the changes would have little effect on its web visitors since the cable news network publishes on a variety of other social media platforms, including Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter. CNN has also become less dependent on Facebook traffic by posting more content as part of Facebook's Instant Articles program, in which readers stay within the Facebook app instead of being driven to a publisher's website.
"We haven't put our eggs all in one basket," said Samantha Barry, CNN's head of social media.
BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Vice Media Inc. all declined to comment on the changes.
