Parse.ly: How social media content changed in 2020 and how it will impact content creators in 2021

Parse.ly released a new report "Changes in Social Media Content in 2020 and Their Impact on Content Creators in 2021". The data shows that the total views of health and fitness content increased by 307% year-on-year in 2020, and the views of career-related content increased by 188%.

Health and Fitness content received 9.6 billion total page views in 2020, up from 2.4 billion in 2019, making it the second most popular category. Prior to the pandemic, the second most popular content was Technology and Computing, but despite a 37% year-over-year increase in page views to 4.2 billion, it dropped to sixth place in 2020.

Legal, government, and political content remained at the top of the list in 2020, attracting a total of 15.7 billion views, up 71% from 9.2 billion in 2019.

For analysis, Parse.ly broke down domains’ referral sources into five different areas: direct, internal, search, social, and other. Each of these categories saw growth in total referral traffic in 2020 as content consumption soared.

In March 2020, direct recommendations replaced searches as the largest source, up 56.8% from February 2020. After March, direct traffic has remained high.

In 2020, search media views reached 27.2 billion times, a year-on-year increase of 41%; non-media views reached 977 million times, a year-on-year increase of 54%.

On the social networking side, despite algorithm changes that have affected publishers in recent years, Facebook remains dominant, with 14.6 billion media page views, up 51%, and 156 million non-media page views, up 15%.

The “other” recommendation sources are mainly composed of aggregators. Among them, Google News accounted for the largest number of media views, reaching 2 billion times, an increase of 56%.

Mobile has been the channel with the most daily views in 2020, accounting for 66% of media views and 50% of non-media traffic. Desktop accounts for 27% of media traffic and 46% of non-media traffic.

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