From the archive. First published in March 2018. Rewritten for clarity, with a note on what happened afterwards.
For a few months in 2017, Facebook tested splitting the feed in two: one for friends and family, a separate Explore Feed for pages. In six countries it was not a test but the default, and page reach in those markets collapsed almost overnight. In March 2018 Facebook ended the experiment.
Why it mattered so much
A separate feed for pages sounds like a minor layout change. In practice it was close to an extinction event. Publishers in the test countries reported reach falling by double digit multiples, because almost nobody visited the second feed voluntarily. The lesson was blunt: a page’s entire value depends on sitting in the same stream as the content people actually came for.
Why it was dropped
Facebook said people did not want two feeds. The outcome in the test markets supported that: engagement dropped, and in several countries it had real consequences for how people got news. The experiment ended and the feed stayed unified.
What replaced it, which is the interesting part
Facebook achieved something similar without splitting anything. Rather than separating page content into its own feed, it reduced how much of it appeared in the main feed, then began filling the space with AI recommended content from accounts people do not follow at all. By 2024 that was running at around 30 percent of the Facebook feed.
The net effect for a page is comparable to the Explore Feed, with one important difference. Under Explore, your content went somewhere nobody looked. Under recommendations, your content can be shown to people who have never heard of you, if it is good enough to be recommended. One is a wall, the other is a lottery you can improve your odds in.
What to do about it is in our guide to organic reach.
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