In recent months, some Facebook page owners have noticed that their accounts are driving much less traffic to their websites than they used to. In some cases, Facebook clickthroughs are down by as much as half, despite a huge growth in likes. Even worse, some brands noticed that this drop in traffic coincided with a new Facebook feature called "promoted posts" through which brands can pay cold hard cash to push their content out to more news feeds than they would normally reach—and the brands are not happy about it.

This juxtaposition of events makes it look like Facebook is artificially driving down traffic, then holding the old level of traffic hostage in order to generate some new revenue. But Facebook insists it's doing nothing of the sort; instead, the company says that it's just trying to keep its users' Facebook feeds from getting too crufty with promotional posts they don't want to see. In other words, Facebook claims to be on the side of users against the advertisers, even if it's making money on the deal.

The social network finds itself in a delicate position: for the first time, it's trying to strike a balance between helping brands to reach users, keeping users returning to their news feeds, and making money of its own as pressure produce revenue rises.

Broken on purpose?

Many page owners have noted this year that, even as their number of fans has risen, traffic has gone down. The blog Dangerous Minds wrote about how it rose from 29,000 to 53,000 Facebook likes even as traffic to its site from shared Facebook posts went down by one half to two-thirds in the same time period.

"Spring of 2012 was when bloggers, non-profits, indie bands, George Takei, community theaters, photographers, caterers, artists, mega-churches, high schools, tee-shirt vendors, campus coffee shops, art galleries, museums, charities, food trucks, and a near infinite variety of organizations; individuals from all walks of life; and businesses, both large and small, began to detect—for it was almost imperceptible at first—that the volume was getting turned down on their Facebook reach," wrote the site under the headline "THE BIGGEST ‘BAIT N’ SWITCH’ IN HISTORY?" "Each post was now being seen only by a fraction of their total 'fans' who would previously have seen them."

A post at the New York Observer in September reported that Facebook posts made from a brand's fan page—say, from Macy's, Walmart, or a celebrity like Kim Kardashian—now reach only 15 percent of fans on average. (Ars' own Facebook page has experienced similar fluctuations: even as likes continue to climb, traffic generated by the page has remained unusually low.)

"Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users," wrote Ryan Holiday, a PR strategist, in that post. Holiday thinks that the broken-ness is meant to drive brands to use promoted posts, which were introduced in May. To promote a post, page owners pay a dollar amount (anywhere from five dollars to thousands of dollars) to increase the reach of a post beyond the number of people who might see it organically.

To outraged users, it's a stickup, but Facebook argues that traffic generated from Facebook pages only seems low because Facebook is just doing what it has always done: grooming every user's feed in order to show them only content that it thinks each user will find interesting. And there's value in this; if your news feed was an equal-opportunity space, it would be at this point nothing but offers for FarmVille produce and a thousand status updates on everyone's new babies. Should that happen, your interest in checking the service might wane. Facebook doesn't show you everything every person or brand you subscribe to says, and it's always been that way.

The lower traffic for posts from fan pages are just part of keeping the feed balanced and interesting ("engaging," in marketing-speak), Facebook says. In a statement sent to Ars, Facebook says that "all content should be as engaging as the posts you see from friends and family." But how does the company square that with the sly offering of the opportunity to override the irrelevance or poor quality of a post with dollar bills?

Poor posts will cost you

Philip Zigoris, a Facebook ads engineer, addressed some of these questions in a blog post last Thursday, but he didn't touch on the sudden drop in traffic from fan pages—the aspect of this story that makes post promotion look the most like a money grab.

He did make the point that promoting posts doesn't automatically blast them to everyone's news feed. "We constantly monitor signals from people in news feed," wrote Zigoris. Signals include likes or comments as well as "hide this post" clicks or reports of spam. "For posts that you see are getting a lot of responses, you can promote them to extend your reach to more news feeds," Zigoris added. A popular post that gets paid promotion can score a huge reach because its quality has been proven, somewhat, by natural selection.

Facebook told Ars separately that the converse of this statement is also true: if a post receives few or mostly negative reactions, it is more expensive for the page owner to promote than if the post were popular on its own, and such posts don't reach as far. The goal is to make sure that even promoted posts feel relevant and interesting to read.

Until recently, brand pages have been governed only by the same newsfeed-grooming rules that are applied to one's Facebook friends. Facebook wouldn't answer our specific questions about brands and traffic, but it does seem clear that posts from brands have grown significantly in the last couple of years and might be in need of some pruning. While the number of brand "likes" by a single user may not outweigh their number of friends, brands have become far more regular posters than individuals, and they have a much broader reach. As of May, the average Facebook user had 229 friends and only 17 percent posted a status update once or more per day, according to one study; as of August, the average Facebook brand/fan page had 40,000 fans and averaged one post per day, according to another.

So perhaps the complainers have a point. Facebook may indeed have curbed brand traffic even as it introduced promoted posts to monetize this filtering process. But Facebook's actions might truly be serving readers at the same time by keeping them from drowning in a post deluge. (If so, it does seem like Facebook should provide users the option to op-out of the filter and see all posts from particular people or brands, should they wish.) And companies that sell ads have always charged for access to an audience.

Whatever the truth of the situation, such disputes are likely to escalate in future as Facebook's drive for revenue threatens to upset a formerly solid balance. Previously, the site largely played referee on news feeds between Facebook friends. Now, as it tries to introduce sponsored content and as brands flock to Facebook, it's caught between keeping brands happy, keeping users interested, and creating a revenue stream for itself. If users' news feeds become a wasteland of Tide advertisements and posts about how many friends have "liked" Target, those users are increasingly unlikely to return. But if Facebook doesn't let brands get their message out without throwing up ever-more toll booths, the brands might jump ship, too, making Facebook's promoted-posts plan a total failure.