[jasode]

>There has to be prioritization and people have a natural limit to how much time and attention

I agree that this is probably the root cause. The top of the FB newsfeed is a zero sum game because each person has a finite amount of time.

Since the pixels of a newsfeed is always filled with <something> instead of being empty, it means there should be a corresponding "something" that increased in frequency which in turn, diluted the frequency of the Chicago Tribute. E.g., a person "likes" Marvel films and NFL/NBA/MLB sports so they get more of those posts which crowds out the newspapers' posts. It can either a rash of "new likes" or a FB algorithm change that re-prioritized them.

Kurt Gessler is only able to see the audience stats from the vantage point of Chicago Tribune instead of total stats from the audience perspective. Therefore, it's like the proverbial blind men feeling around the elephant.

[jsnell]

> Kurt Gessler is only able to see the audience stats from the vantage point of Chicago Tribune instead of total stats from the audience perspective.

Getting a wider perspective seems to be exactly why this post was written. The main call to action at the end of the blog post is to other content creators, to see if they're experiencing the same thing. Get enough data points, and you can start to form testable hypotheses about what's being prioritized now.

[jasode]

>The main call to action at the end of the blog post is to other content creators,

I'm not a FB analytics expert but to me, it seems like it would be better to get statistics from a bunch of "bots" that saw posts from the audience side. Correlating with other creators still seems to be a very limited form of analysis.

Of course, one wouldn't have to do any of that if Facebook cooperates and transparently explains to the publishers how the zero-sum game has been reprioritized against them.