Facebook did not just give every "fan" page an equal-sized traffic haircut. They started limiting page content in accordance with how much organic (non-paid) engagement it gets.

So for example Facebook pages like "Humans of New York" or "I Fucking Love Science" or "Amy Poehler's Smart Girls" still get popped into a lot of timelines despite (to my knowledge) not paying at all for boosting. Why? Because a lot of people love that content.

But if some other Facebook page saw a huge drop-off that stayed dropped off, then maybe that content is just not as interesting as other pages (like the ones above for example).

And in fact this is why Facebook made changes to page content visibility in the first place. Most pages posted boring obvious ads instead of interesting content.

Pages can still pay for higher visibility, but those are ads. Just like people can pay to "get into the New York Times"--via ads, not articles. And just like the NY Times, there is only a fixed amount of ad inventory at Facebook. Even when pages are paying, Facebook limits their audience, in order to keep the audience happy. No one wants to see a newsfeed full of 100% ads. Or even 50% ads. Or 25%.

You can still reach some of your audience freely. You can argue that Facebook is rent-seeking, but consider the problem that it solves: if every fanpage could reach all their audience for free, every user's timeline would turn into a product catalog.

Just go and count how many things you've liked so far. I have 821 "items" liked, most of them fanpages. If every one of them would be able to reach me with all their posts, I'd quit Facebook on the spot. The users are not there for the fanpages. That's why Facebook won't let companies hit everyone. Now whether or not they should allow people to pay for wider reach, that's questionable, but then again - it at least makes people prioritize. If you have a limited marketing budget, you will tend to pay for and thus prioritize more important communication.

I am not using facebook anymore, but i had a page that had organically grew its audience and brought a lot of traffic to facebook. I agree that pushing updates every day would clog users' timeline, but there are better ways to fix that. The fact that they chose to take your followers and basically resell them back to you is so dumb that i never bothered to pay up. Shows lack of vision on their part.

I guess they could've simply tied the post range to the inverse of posting frequency - i.e. if you post once a month, you reach everyone, if you post daily, you'll reach some random subset, etc.

But then again, Facebook has to get the money for their servers from somewhere (or at least enough of it to attract more investors). They could've chosen worse monetization strategies.