The changes that Facebook recently made continue to remain current, since the negative quantitative impact on Armenia’s media sector hasn’t ceased. For this reason, it became necessary to add a second part to my first article on this topic.

Let’s try to observe Armenian news outlets’ Facebook pages over the past few weeks, making use of the statistics provided by Socialbakers.com.

This site constantly monitors the growth of the number of likes on Facebook pages, as well as the “talking about this” metric, which shows the actual number of people who are engaged and interacting with a page — by liking, commenting, or sharing posts. This is the metric that better reveals the increase or decrease of visits coming from Facebook.

Let’s look at the situation of the Facebook pages of several news websites in Armenia over the last few weeks.

The Bad News

The page continuing to have the most “likes” is Blognews.am. The number of those “liking” the page drastically increased over the last few days.

But since the beginning of December, the number of people “talking about this” drastically declined.

The same goes for HotTV.

And Mediamall.

It’s the same situation with Operativ.

And at 168.am.

The Good News

 It seems that a few news outlets have overcome the crisis. It’s apparent in the case of Hetq, that it’s overcoming the dip.

The same can be seen with 1in.am. 

The Panarmenian.net page has drastically increased. 

In this overall depressive situation, RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun radio) shows an indescribable increase, having (it can even be said) an explosive effect.

Drastic changes are apparent also in international media. 

For example, Vedomosti.

And CNN.

And The Guardian. 

The facts prove that increasing the number of likes or moreover, increasing the number of articles published (and shared) during the day no longer leads to more site visits. Facebook page administrators are confronted with an issue — to shape a community of engaged readers. 

Samvel Martirosyan

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.