Web sites had traffic before Facebook came along, right? Maybe we’re going back to the future . . .

Quick: Before you read this, bookmark this site. Do it now. Now I’ll explain why. Facebook has only existed since 2005, and yet I’ve got some astonishing trivia for you about the Internet:

There were web sites before that. They even had traffic. You could find them on search engines, and crosslinked from other sites. It was really something. It’s hard to imagine today that anyone got traffic to a site without the power of social media to drive links. But it happened. And because I know that history, I’m confident the changes we’ve made to this site – similar to those made by many others – will prove worthwhile and even prosperous over time. We will be fine here in the digital space, while Mark Zuckerberg grapples with his data boondoggles, his algorithm woes and the fairly obvious accusations of political bias dogging Facebook. But let’s be honest about something: For the past few years, this site and most others with heavy traffic relied on Facebook to drive that traffic. After my presidential campaign ended, I had more than 400,000 likes to my Facebook page. Since then, with my radio shows and frequent visibility as a Fox News contributor, that number has grown to more than 1.5 million. And we took advantage of it. We wrote content for this page that was designed to work well with Facebook’s audience. We shared things at just the right times of the day. And we got traffic! It was free, it was effective and we benefited from it. It seemed too good to be true. And maybe it was. I suppose Facebook could always reconsider the algorithm changes that have started putting sites like this one (but I must emphasize, not this one) out of business, while cratering the traffic for many others. But if I had to guess, I’d say they won’t. And look, they don’t have to. Facebook is a private-sector business and they can monetize it any way they want. In my opinion, it’s not wise for them to do this kind of damage to their longtime users, but I don’t put in any money and I don’t think they care what my opinion is. I also don’t think it’s wise for them to start playing favorites based on political ideology, which is the only way to explain what happened recently to Diamond and Silk. (Although it appears enough outcry can still get results, even from Facebook.)

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Mr. Zuckerberg is clearly a liberal. COO Sheryl Sandberg is clearly a liberal. We’ve already heard the stories of employees who control trending news using the section to push leftism and hype anti-Trump material. And I know enough about algorithms to know that you can manipulate them to make certain pieces disappear if they use a certain name enough times, or, say, tout the positive results of a tax cut. Even if it’s not the corporate policy of Zuckerberg and Sandberg to do this, they’ve assembled an eager team of young liberals who will often find the power to do it too much to resist. So where do we go from here? Well, we’ve still got 1.5 million Facebook fans, and we’re not going to abandon them. Sadly, far too many of them don’t see our posts anymore because Facebook’s algorithm change has made us largely invisible. We’re learning how to adjust to it, and I’m confident we’re going to get some better results. But we will never again proceed as if Facebook can single-handedly deliver us the traffic we need. The changes we’ve made to this site are designed to work with multiple platforms and make us easier to find in a lot of different ways. Remember, there were successful web sites before there was Facebook. And there will be successful web sites now that Facebook no longer wants to be the big driver of traffic. This site is going to be one of them. So why did I tell you to bookmark us? Because I want to save you a step. There’s news, commentary, video, podcasts and all kinds of good stuff updated daily here, and you might as well just hit us up directly every day. Just like people did way back in the ancient times of . . . 2004.