In the much-circulated New York Times Innovation Report, perhaps the most discussed graph was this one, showing a roughly 40% decline in homepage audience over the past three years.

With that graph, innumerable articles announcing the “death of the homepage” were written, in The Atlantic, Poynter, and on numerous blogs. Most hinged on the relationship between the rise of social traffic and the decrease in homepage traffic. One thing that isn’t mentioned in most of these articles, though, is that the rise in social traffic was contemporaneous with a rise in mobile traffic, and that mobile is as much a principal part of the story as social is. Here, I’d like to explore the three-way interaction between mobile traffic, social, and homepage visitation.

Social traffic and mobile devices

The importance of social sharing on mobile devices is much discussed. (Take for example, the recent ShareThis report, which reported that 63% of Twitter activity and 44% of Facebook activity happens on mobile.) People aren’t just using social media on mobile to share articles, of course, they’re also clicking to those articles. Below, we break down the share of traffic coming from Facebook and Twitter by device across a random sample of our sites. (Note: We specifically chose sites without separate mobile sites and without mobile apps, to ensure that we’re making fair comparisons across devices.)

Facebook’s share of overall mobile referrals is nearly 2.7x larger than its share on desktop. Twitter’s share is 2.5x larger on mobile than on desktop. And, if anything, those numbers likely undercount the significance of social referrals, since many apps don’t forward referrer information and get thrown into the bucket of “dark social.” In some sense, then, it’s fair to say that—for most sites—mobile traffic more-or-less is social traffic.

Mobile and homepage traffic

Setting aside where visitors come from, mobile visitors are substantially less likely to interact with a site’s homepage. Below we plot, for the same collection of sites as above, the fraction of visitors that have visited any landing page (e.g. the homepage, a section front) over a month.

What we see is dramatic: Desktop visitors are over 4x more likely to visit landing pages than those on phones.

Is that because mobile visitors come from social sources, and social visitors are less likely to visit landing pages—a fact that’s often cited when discussing the state of homepage traffic? Or is it not an issue of referrer at all—are mobile visitors intrinsically less likely to visit landing pages? To move toward an answer, we can control for referrer and ask the same question. Below, we plot the fraction of visitors who come to the site from Facebook and then and during the same month (but not necessarily on the same visit) visit a landing page.

Comparing this graph to the previous one, three things are clear:

1. As discussed above, mobile visitors are significantly less likely to ever visit landing pages than desktop and tablet visitors.
2. Similarly, visitors who come from Facebook are significantly less likely to ever visit landing pages than those who come from other sources. On average, only 6% of visitors who come from Facebook ever visit a landing page, compared to nearly 14% of overall visitors.
3. These two phenomena are to some degree independent—desktop-based Facebook visitors are half as likely to visit landing pages as other desktop-based visitors, while mobile Facebook visitors are one-third as likely to visit homepages as other mobile visitors.

It’s also worth a quick note that, in all of these respects, tablet traffic is much closer to desktop traffic than it is to mobile traffic.

Overall, this seems to be cause for substantial concern to publishers—increases in social and mobile traffic are the two most significant traffic trends of the past few years, and both are strongly associated with drops in homepage traffic. Since, as we’ve seen before, homepage visitors are typically a site’s most loyal audience, potential drops in homepage visitors should be concerning. In the short term, it’s safe to assume that a successful mobile strategy will hinge upon a steady stream of social links—that visitors won’t return unless we reach out to them directly. In the longer term, there’s a lot of work for all of us in determining how best to build an audience in a post-desktop (and potentially post-homepage) world.