Dive Brief:
- Facebook has acquired link tracking firm CrowdTangle, according to the latter's website announcement.
- CrowdTangle tracks how content links are shared on social media platforms and its customer base includes newspapers, television stations, digital media outlets, investigative journalists, entertainment companies, sports teams and nonprofits.
- According to Venture Beat, CrowdTangle will remain a separate company from Facebook, and terms of the deal haven’t been released.
Dive Insight:
Links are key way that information on the Internet is organized and shared. As the largest social media platform, Facebook is an important force in which links are shared. However, quality links have been an issue on the site, something the company may be trying to address with the CrowdTangle acquisition.
Facebook has an occasionally uneasy alliance with publishers. At times it has made algorithm changes that dramatically impacted publisher traffic from shared links to their content. The social media giant has also faced criticism, very notably this election season, that “news” links on users’ news feeds aren’t always from reputable outlets even for stories that are promoted as trending on the platform.
For example, research by SimilarWeb compared traffic to U.S. media websites coming from Facebook between Q1 and Q2 this year and found that traffic to some sites dropped as much as 50%. The drop was attributed to an algorithm shift that emphasized posts from friends and family over other entities including publishers.
Officially teaming up with CrowdTangle via the acquisition should make publishers feel at least a bit better since most of the major online publishers, such as NPR, BBC, BuzzFeed and Vox, all use CrowdTangle’s product to track content on social media.
Venture Beat quoted Facebook on the deal: “Publishers around the world turn to CrowdTangle to surface stories that matter, measure their social performance, and identify influencers. We are excited to work with CrowdTangle to deliver these and more insights to more publishers.”