Facebook news ban drops reader traffic to news stories by 13 per cent within Australia, Chartbeat data shows

Traffic to Australian news websites tumbled in the hours following Facebook’s news ban and audiences overall have not shifted to new platforms, according to data from web analytics company Chartbeat.

Facebook blocked Australians from accessing news content on its platform at around 5:30am AEDT on Thursday in response to the Government’s proposed new laws forcing tech companies to pay publishers for news content.

Chartbeat — a tool used by many Australian news outlets, including the ABC — tracks in real time the number of readers on a digital article and how they were referred to the story, whether via Facebook, Google search, hyperlink, or internally through a publisher’s website or app.

Its data, collected from around 255 Australian…