Facebook [stckqut]FB[/stckqut] might be sending less traffic to publishers’ websites now than it did in January, or more traffic, or the same amount of traffic. It depends on who you ask.

In recent years publishers have increasingly relied on Facebook to drive users to their websites, and some sites now receive as much as 90% of their traffic from the social network.

But that trend has some media executives nervous. Facebook could begin to charge for the traffic it sends to their properties, they say, or give preference to content hosted directly on its network through features such as its Instant Articles initiative.

As a result, there’s a growing thirst for data about Facebook referral trends. Online measurement companies regularly release data aggregated from a selection of sites, which they say offers insight into Facebook’s systems beyond the experiences of individual publishers.

The problem is, those companies examine different groups of sites and use different methodologies to analyze their data, therefore arriving at very different conclusions.

Source: Is Facebook Driving Less Traffic to Publishers’ Sites?