Yesterday I wrote a piece for Marketing Magazine explaining that websites are dead because of Facebook’s introduction of Instant Pages.

Some people said I was overstating the case. Let’s see, shall we?

Using a service such as Ahrefs we can look at publicly available data to gauge the level of interaction with a given page of a website, says E Consultancy.

Reviewing any major brand publishing effort reveals that, barring a few outliers, the majority of content published to these sites receives next to no links and goes nowhere, receiving few shares.

Example one:  FAB Beauty from L’Oreal.

A business with revenues of over £17bn a year and over 78,000 employees, it received 1,972 shares for its top post followed by an average of only 66 shares per post for everything subsequent to this.

The referring domain data indicates no one is linking here from elsewhere on the web. This site is dead in the water. Sorry.

Traveler from Marriott, a business with revenues of £9bn a year and 200,000 employees, received 1,915 shares for its top post.

The average for the remaining 319 posts in Ahrefs’ index is 83 shares.

The Engagement Bureau from Mastercard received 3,471 shares for its top post. The average for the rest of the posts in Ahrefs’ index is 42 shares.

This business has revenues of £6.6bn and over 10,000 employees.

In the case of each site one or two pieces of content perform significantly better than the rest, but none are exactly stellar performers.

These are instantly recognisable brands with huge numbers of employees who invest substantial amounts in advertising. Yet the average amount of sharing occurring is utterly insignificant.

By contrast, The Guardian has half a million entries in Ahrefs’ index of content and receives an average of over 77,000 shares across the top 1,000 posts. The Travel section alone gets 4,500 shares on average across its top 1,000 posts. Despite all those page views The Guardian is losing money.

Marketers used to talk about ‘driving traffic’ back to a brand’s website from such activity. This doesn’t happen.

The fact is, paid promotion is behind any ‘popularity’ touted by the brand. If their content gets shared on social media, it’s to that platform’s benefit, rather than their own.

Outside of the giants, the web is a play for niche companies only.

I’m interested in a FREE content audit

 

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