I have been spending a fair portion of 2015 working with analytics for @nprviz. I have been investigating where our traffic comes from, how people interact with our work, and where they go after they are done.

I have more questions than answers.

Rather, I have answers, but I don’t like them.

That quote that’s been going around about the long list of publishers who get two-thirds of their traffic from Facebook? That’s us (at least, @nprviz. NPR as a whole is a different story). It sucks.

It sucks because when the Facebook post promoting a project flops, the project ceases to matter. We are entirely dependent on an algorithmic black box we cannot control. Even when a post is successful, when you find out how many people that post actually reached and calculate your clickthrough rate, you end up feeling just as bad.

The dystopian predictions of a Facebook-driven content ecosystem — where all content is native to the network—are starting to sound less dystopian and more pragmatic. How else will you really reach your audience?