From the archive. First published in November 2017. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
In late 2017, Facebook launched a secondary feed called Explore, carrying posts from pages people do not follow. In most countries it was an extra tab nobody was obliged to visit. In six markets it was not optional: posts from pages were removed from the main feed entirely and pushed into Explore.
What happened in those six countries
Page reach collapsed. Publishers in the affected markets reported losing the large majority of their Facebook traffic within days, because almost nobody opened the second feed voluntarily. In several of those countries Facebook was a primary route for news, so the consequences went well beyond marketing.
Facebook maintained throughout that it was a test and that there were no plans to roll it out globally. Nobody outside the company could verify that, which is why it caused so much anxiety among page owners everywhere.
How it ended
Facebook shut the experiment down in March 2018 and kept a single unified feed. The stated reason was that people did not want two feeds, which the test data supported.
What it demonstrated
A page’s value depends entirely on sitting in the same stream as the content people actually open the app for. Move it one tab away and the audience does not follow. That is worth remembering when you are valuing a page: you are not buying followers, you are buying a position in a feed that somebody else controls.
The sequel is more interesting than the original. Facebook did not need a separate feed in the end. It reduced the share of the main feed given to page content and filled the space with AI recommended posts from accounts people do not follow. By 2024 that was around 30 percent of the feed. The outcome resembles Explore, except that your content can now be recommended to strangers rather than being hidden behind a tab. That is a meaningfully better deal, and it is the basis of the advice in our guide to organic reach.
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