In 2021, I grappled with a difficult decision. At the time, Facebook accounted for more than 80% of Mongabay’s external referral traffic — but we were increasingly questioning the value of that traffic.
Mongabay’s mission as a nonprofit newsroom is to produce journalism that informs and drives impact, not just generate clicks. Years earlier, we’d intentionally moved away from an ad-driven model to prioritize impact over pageviews. That shift opened up possibilities we wouldn’t have considered as a for-profit — like making our articles free for anyone to use, including commercial outlets.
But Facebook was a growing concern. Our content was frequently blocked or removed — important stories about conservation, wildlife trafficking, and illegal mining flagged incorrectly by automated systems. Meanwhile, the quality of traffic from Facebook was declining fast: high bounce rates, low time on page, shallow engagement. The signal we cared about most — stories of our reporting leading to change after being discovered on Facebook — was disappearing.
It became clear: Facebook was delivering volume, not impact.
Still, walking away from such a large source of traffic wasn’t something we took lightly. I briefed our board and major donors, shared the data, and laid out the risks. We asked ourselves: If the return isn’t there, why keep investing? And what’s the opportunity cost of staying the course?
Then we made the call. We scaled back our efforts on Facebook for our global English site — reallocating staff time to channels where we could build stronger, more meaningful relationships with our audience. That meant newsletters, LinkedIn, YouTube, partnerships, and yes, even Twitter (back then).
Traffic from Facebook plummeted — down 18 million sessions in a year for our global English site alone. But the number that mattered most? Total time spent on our site rose 77%. It turns out a lot of that Facebook traffic was just empty pageviews.
It was a hard decision, but the right one. Today, Mongabay’s influence is growing, and Facebook is largely irrelevant to us — except in a few regions.
The experience reaffirmed three things for me: Do the analysis. Communicate the risks. And stay anchored to your mission, even when it’s hard.
A few lessons:
1) Aligning resources with your mission requires periodic reassessment: This decision wasn’t made once and forgotten — it came after noticing a drift between effort and impact. Regularly re-evaluating whether your investments (time, staff, money) are advancing your mission is crucial, especially when platforms or technologies evolve.
2) Not all growth is good growth: More traffic felt like success for a time, but ultimately, empty pageviews didn’t serve your goals. This is a reminder that growth metrics — like clicks or sessions — can be misleading if they aren’t connected to meaningful engagement or outcomes.
3) Beware of over-reliance on any single platform: The experience highlights the risk of becoming too dependent on one channel — especially one you don’t control. When algorithms shift or moderation errors happen, it can undermine your work. Diversification, even if harder in the short term, builds resilience.
4) Mission clarity can be a competitive advantage: Being clear about what success looks like — impact, not just traffic — made this decision possible. A for-profit might have felt trapped by the need to feed the ad model. Our nonprofit structure gave us the flexibility to act in alignment with our mission.
5) Sunk costs should not dictate future investment: It’s easy to keep investing in something because you’ve put so much time or effort into it already. Stepping back from Facebook, even after years of audience-building, required acknowledging sunk costs and focusing instead on future value.
6) Engagement quality is often more revealing than volume: Measuring metrics like scroll depth, time on page, and bounce rate provided deeper insight than traffic numbers alone. Choosing the right metrics — not just the easiest ones to track — shaped a better decision.
