15 Jan Social Media Independence
AS THE COUPLING CONTINUES WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?
AS FACEBOOK CONTINUES
its long, “slow” breakup with the news business, a process that should now be acknowledged across the industry, each
“bombshell” announcement from the company grows less surprising. And those announcements are coming in fast, even as we write this chapter
— on July 28, Axios reported that Facebook, or Meta as the company is now called, began telling its news partners in the U.S. that the company no
longer plans to pay publishers for their content to run on Facebook’s News Tab.
News is no longer part of the company’s “new direction” and so ended an experiment or arrangement that always seemed a little fraught. Sure, it was worth valuable money to news organisations. In 2019, in a $105 million, threeyear deal, Facebook began paying news outlets for stories that appeared in the News Tab. It spent more than $10 million on its news partnership with the Wall Street Journal, more than $3 million on its deal with CNN, and more than $20 million on its partnership with the New York Times, sources told
Axios.
“A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the U.S,” an unnamed Meta spokesperson told Axios. “Most people do not come to Facebook for news, and as a business, it doesn’t make sense to over-invest in areas that don’t align with user preferences.”
A LONG BREAK UP
We intend to explore two aspects of the breakup with social media in this chapter — one, predominantly centred around Meta, involves the declining referrals to news from the platform. The other is the content paying agreements and legislations that have come into place in several parts of the world that have sought to get news publishers some compensation for the small matter of the Meta and Google duopoly basically taking all the money there is to have from digital advertising.Both are connected of course, but they are different threads.
We’ll start first with Facebook because it is the relationship that is most complicated. As Joshua Benton notes in an excellent recent piece for Nieman Lab, Facebook was not originally intended to be the world’s largest distributor of human attention to news stories. It became that, circa 2015. But that responsibility became a nuisance, an it’s spent the past seven years walking away from it. Though there have been some twists and turns along the way.
First came the infamous pivot to video strategy, with Facebook working hard to convince publishers that this was the future. It spent millions of dollars to clinch these deals only for allegations to later emerge that it misled advertisers about the metrics for video viewership on its platform. Even so, Benton notes, Facebook traffic to news sites was still going up and up and publishers muddling toward their digital future were happy for the clicks. Newsrooms remoulded their editorial strategies to maximise likes
and shares on Facebook. In 2015, the platform officially dethroned Google as the top driver of traffic to news sites.
Less than a year and a half later, however, things had changed somewhat dramatically. The fact that Facebook was the place for people to share news wasn’t a good look when concerns were spreading across the world about fake news and misinformation, most of it shared through social networks. The years of the Trump presidency in the U.S. accentuated these concerns and Facebook began to pull back.
Reporting on the timeline of events in a 2018 article titled “The Great Facebook Crash”, Slate magazine noted that in June 2016, Facebook had a shift in philosophy, prioritising posts from individual friends and family over those from groups, brand pages, and (to a lesser extent) news
outlets. The effects appeared relatively subtle at first, but Facebook acknowledges they likely compounded over time. Then, in January 2018—a time when it was under heavy fire for its role in elections and politics around the world—Facebook announced another major change to how its news feed algorithm chooses what you see when you
load up the platform, this time de-emphasising news publishers in particular and skewing the feed further toward posts from individuals. By 2017, Facebook, once news publishing’s No. 1 source of traffic, lost that title back to Google, which now sends roughly twice as many clicks as Facebook does.
PAYING FOR CONTENT
2019 brought another change of direction with the aforementioned News Tab section curated by Facebook editors. Aside from deals with publishers in the U.S. which Meta is now pulling the plug on, similar deals with publishers were struck with publishers in the U.K., France, Germany and Australia. At the time of writing this article, those deals remain unchanged.
Several experts and industry analysts commented at the time that for Facebook, and Google who also responded with their own payments structure to news (more on that later), it felt very much like a PR exercise as more and more attention was drawn to the fact that the two tech giants dominated the digital advertising space leaving very little for anyone else.
“There are lots of ways to look at how the duopoly looks at its relationship with the news industry — as generous corporate citizens who care about the information environment, say, or as a pillaging cartel ruining society by vacuuming ad dollars,” Benton wrote in another searing piece for Nieman Lab.
“But the correct way to view Google and Facebook’s actions, I believe, is through the lens of PR. The troubles of the news business are a major PR problem for these companies, who — however fair they or anyone else thinks it is — get blamed for its ills.”
From a legal perspective, Benton continues that it’s entirely unclear why Facebook is paying any of these publishers. “Open up your Facebook News Tab, if you can find it, and tap on a story — it’s just a link to the publication’s website, opening in a browser. You don’t need to pay a site to link to one of its news stories; after all, Facebook isn’t paying most of the publishers in the News Tab, and it doesn’t pay publishers for any of the links in News Feed.”
So why is Facebook doing it? “Because this lets them (1) pick the publishers they want to pay, (2) pick the amount of money they want to pay them, (3) get publishers to stop complaining, at least hopefully, and (4) get headlines like “Facebook Offers News Outlets Millions of Dollars a Year,” in the hopes that they can stave off government regulation or taxation.”
The launch of the News Tab in fact, was a highprofile affair, including a one-on-one interview, between Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp and Mark Zuckerberg. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review that the meeting was like “a Camp David for peace between
the most truculent old media empire and one of its most noxious disruptors,” and wondered how much it had cost for News Corp to forget about its longstanding
opposition to Facebook. The event was “a publicity coup for Facebook; it tamed the biggest beast in the journalism jungle.”
Three years on, and in this topsy-turvy cycle of a relationship that was ill-matched from the start, Facebook has decided once again that its “commitment” to news is not worth the hassle after all. The first indication was via a Wall Street Journal article in June this year which said the company hasn’t provided publishers with any indication that it plans to re-up the content payment partnerships in their current form and that it was “looking to shift its investments away from news and toward products that attract creators such as short-form video producers to compete with ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, according to some of the people…
“Also,” the article notes, “Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been disappointed by regulatory efforts around the world looking to force platforms like Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to pay publishers for any news content available on their platforms, people familiar with the matter said. Such moves have damped Mr. Zuckerberg’s enthusiasm for making news a bigger part of Facebook’s offerings”, they said.
Also that month, numerous reports spelled out another pivot by the company in terms of how it saw its future. The Verge reported in June that Facebook employees were recently given a new directive with sweeping implications: make the app’s feed more like TikTok.
“Simply bringing Reels, the company’s shortform video feature, from Instagram into Facebook wasn’t going to cut it. Executives were closely tracking TikTok’s moves and had grown worried that they weren’t doing enough to compete. In conversations with CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year, they decided that Facebook needed to
rethink the feed entirely. In an internal memofrom late April obtained by The Verge, the Meta executive in charge of Facebook, Tom Alison, spelled out the plan: rather than prioritise posts from accounts people follow, Facebook’s main feed will, like TikTok, start heavily recommending posts regardless of where they come from…”
In other words, Facebook is now seeking to pivot from serving as a forum for interacting with friends and family to acting as an AI powered discovery engine, a service that is centred exposing users to content created by others on the platform.
Writing for Axios, Scott Rosenberg argued that “Facebook’s TikTok-like redesign marks sunset of [the] social networking era” with a greater move from the family-and-friends social graph towards a discovery engine that “shape[s] your online lifearound the algorithmically-sorted preferences ofmillions of strangers around the globe”.
NEWS ON THE DECLINE
So where does news fit in now? The truth is that we may finally have reached an inflection point where even the pretence of being interested in news no longer makes sense for Facebook. “Fewer than one post in every 25 in your News Feed will contain a link to a news story, and many users say they would like to see even less news and political content.” Facebook’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg had said last year.
And this year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report included a question asking people around the world whether they thought a particular platform had too much news, not enough news, or just about the right amount of news. The platform that most people said was too news-heavy was Facebook. In the U.K., 21% of Facebook users surveyed said there was “too much news” on it, versus just 3% who said it didn’t have enough. (55% said “just right,” and 20% couldn’t be bothered to have an opinion.) “Too much” numbers were similar around the English-speaking world: 22% in the U.S., 20% in Australia, and 20% in Canada.
In deeper analysis for Adweek, Mark Stenberg notes that the platform is a critical but declining source of referrals to news. The volume of referral traffic coming from Facebook to publishers has dropped since reaching a peak in 2020.
There are a number of potential explanations for the post-2020 slide, Nic Newman, the senior research assistant at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and lead author of the Digital News Report, told Stenberg. News fatigue has led to decreased news consumption in the U.S., and Facebook has deprioritised news on its platform
in response. Facebook has also lost users to new platforms like TikTok, and those who continue to use the platform spend less time on it.
“In our 2022 Digital News Report, we looked at which social networks people use to consume the news,” Newman said. “What you see is that Facebook is still No. 1, but it has lost 12 percentage points in three years, whereas the other platforms have stayed pretty much the same.”
More telling than the sheer volume of traffic coming from Facebook is the percentage of publishers’ traffic that comes from the site. While traffic declined throughout the industry, the percentage of traffic that publishers get from Facebook has also dropped, indicating that it has become slightly less valuable as a referrer.
In early 2018, Facebook accounted for nearly 25% of publishers’ traffic. That figure has steadily dropped, and the platform now accounts for between 18% and 20% of total external traffic, a percentage that has held fairly steady over the last 12 to 18 months.
In addition to referring less traffic overall, Facebook has also seen engagement on news articles decline, according to data from NewsWhip.
The findings align with other research that suggests consumer appetite for news has decreased, Newman said. “Facebook has found that news, in the era of polarisation, is not serving the company mission of connecting people,” Newman said. “People are finding the news to be depressing, and Facebook is going to make decisions with that in mind.”
Here also, lies the key difference between Google and Facebook. “Publishers sometimes think of Google and Facebook as interchangeable piles of money. But they have different sets of interests,” Benton writes.
“But Facebook? Facebook has been trying to wipe the news off its platform for years. Why would it think it should be doling out hundreds of millions of dollars to publishers it is actively trying to squeeze off its feeds?”
TOWARD AN ERA OF “SERIOUS” REGULATION
The news industry has long argued that Google and Facebook – the Duopoly of the digital advertising market – should pay publishers for the use of their content. Both organisations, however, insisted they were unwilling to set this precedent.
They did end up making significant payments to news organisations, mostly borne out of a desire to quash the growing calls for legislation to compel them to pay for reusing content from news sites, but these were in the form of grants. Google started the Digital News Initiative in 2015 to fund innovation projects at European publishers, a move
that was widely read as an effort to to stave off gowing calls for regulations among countries like Spain, France and Germany. Facebook, which was facing its own share of bad PR problems after the election of Trump, followed suit with its Facebook Journalism Project, launched in 2017.
Both of these projects have given manymillions of dollars to news publishers around the world. Building on the Digital News Initiative, Google announced the launch of the Google News Initiative in March 2018 that had expanded both in scope and to other geographies. A Columbia Journalism review piece from that year noted how
the two tech giants had become two of the biggest funders of journalism in the world.
“Taken together, Facebook and Google have now committed more than half a billion dollars to various journalistic programs and media partnerships over the past three years, not including the money spent internally on developing media-focused products like Facebook’s Instant Articles and Google’s competing AMP mobile project. The result: These mega-platforms are now two of the largest funders of journalism in the world,” Mathew Ingraham wrote for CJR.
The irony, he continued, is hard to miss. “The dismantling of the traditional advertising model— largely at the hands of the social networks, which have siphoned away the majority of industry ad revenue—has left many media companies and journalistic institutions in desperate need of a lifeline. Google and Facebook, meanwhile, are happy to oblige, flush with cash from their ongoing dominance of the digital ad market.”
Nieman Lab, via Benton, also noted that these grants had done very little to meaningfully change the news industry’s core financial crisis. “Publishers’ problems are not, generally speaking, the kind of thing that can be fixed with one-time grants for innovation projects. The core crisis is that the internet fundamentally changed the ways
audiences and advertisers get things done — in ways that hurt expensive-to-produce journalism and helped a few globe-bestriding tech giants like
Google and Facebook.”
If the initiatives and grants can be seen as the first wave of payments to new organisations, as Benton argues, the deals with individual publishers under programmes like Facebook News Tab and Google News Showcase were second. To sum up the problems with these arrangements once again before we proceed: the two tech giants can choose which publishers they can give money to, the details of many of those deals largely remains secret with some of the bigger numbers being uncovered by the “investigative” efforts of outlets like Press Gazette and Axios, and smaller publishers mostly get nothing.
The debate around the terms by which Facebook and Google should pay for news content changed irrevocably however, when Australia upped the ante in 2020.
THE AUSTRALIAN PRECEDENT
In 2020, as the advertising slowdown forced many news companies to make large cutbacks, Google and Facebook’s dominance of the market kept growing (to a combined share of 35% of all global advertising according to GroupM). And as the world was battling the Covid-19 crisis, Australia introduced legislation to force the two companies to now pay for news content.
In July 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) released a draft code, which laid out how the tech giants would need to agree cash-for-content deals with publishers or face an arbitration process. The code came into effect on March 2, 2021. The Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Act 2021 is a mandatory code of conduct which governs commercial relationships between Australian news businesses and ‘designated’ digital platforms who benefit from a significant bargaining power imbalance.
As the legislation loomed, Google moved quickly. In February 2021, it announced the imminent launch of News Showcase in Australia. The tech giant agreed a series of eight-figure Showcase deals with the nation’s largest and most influential publishers – News Corp, Seven West, Nine, ABC and Guardian Australia. These agreements meant that Google could avoid being forced into an arbitration process with the publishers once the law was passed. Others to have signed up Down Under include Yahoo Australia, Business Insider Australia and Conversation Australia. In late 2021, Country Press Australia, a group representing hundreds of local news publications, agreed a deal for its members after being given collective bargaining rights by the ACCC.
Seemingly stunned by the passage of the legislation, Facebook initially said it would no longer allow Australian users to view or share news articles, opting to cut the country off entirely rather than pay its publishers for news content.
Less than a week later, the company restored new slinks and said that it had gotten reassurances from the Australian government that it won’t be forced to pay publishers but will instead be given the chance to negotiate agreements with them.
FOLLOWING SUIT: LEGISLATION IN OTHER COUNTRIES
In August this year, Poynter reported that Australia’s news media bargaining code had managed to prise over $140 million dollars from Google and Facebook as outlets big and small are being paid for content. Google in particular has made deals with essentially all qualifying media companies.
“On a recent trip to Australia, meetings and interviews with journalists, journalism professors and government officials showed widespread enthusiasm for the monetary boost to Australian journalism,” Anya Schiffrin writes for Poynter. “Outlets throughout Australia are hiring new reporters. The Guardian added 50 journalists, bringing their newsroom total up to 150. Journalism professors say their students are getting hired and that there are too many job vacancies to fill.”
“The Code brought far more money to new outlets than expected,” Harry Dugmore, senior lecturer in the communications department at Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast, told Schiffrin. “The question is what will happen when the contracts expire?”
Despite that layer of uncertainty, the fact that this forceful legislation worked in Australia has inspired other countries to try to do the same.
In Canada, The “Online News Act,” or House of Commons bill C-18, will require digital platforms that have a bargaining imbalance, measured by metrics like a firm’s global revenue, with news businesses to make fair deals that would then be assessed by a regulator. If such deals do not meet a set of criteria detailed in the act, the platforms would have to go through mandatory bargaining and final offer arbitration processes overseen by the Canadian Radio‑television and Telecommunications regulator.
In the EU, Meta released Facebook News, a content aggregation service that republishes stories on the company’s platform, to its users in France in February 2022. The social media giant reached an agreement with a French alliance of news publishers, the Alliance de la Presse d’Information Générale last October, after French lawmakers adopted a proposed EU copyright law in 2019. Facebook reached an agreement with French news publishers to remunerate them over the copyright of their content,
Google News returned to Spain last year after the country adopted the EU’s copyright directive, which allows platforms to negotiate the cost of using news content directly with industry representatives. The new law superseded a Spanish regulation, adopted in 2014, that obliged Google and other news aggregators to pay a central licence fee to Spanish news organisations for re-using their stories.
In the US, lawmakers since 2018 have been trying to pass protections for small newspapers facing plummeting subscriptions and advertisement revenue. Trailing the European Union and Australia, the US is inching toward passing its own law after senators appeased unions’ concerns and are poised to win greater bipartisan backing for the measure. The legislation would give publishers and broadcasters a time-limited “safe harbour” to negotiate collectively for compensation from online platforms.
And the UK could introduce a law forcing Meta and Google to pay media outlets for featuring their stories in content feeds or search results. The country’s culture minister Nadine Dorries told the Sunday Times newspaper that she was looking at implementing a similar system to the one introduced in Australia, calling her plans “Australia
plus plus” and “Australia with bolts on”.
NEWS WITHOUT SOCIAL MEDIA – The final decoupling–
In sum, it is the advent of these legislations which has reportedly discouraged Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg from investing any more resources into news and turning his company’s attention elsewhere. We have offered in this chapter various details of Google’s payments to news organisations both by way of comparison and because the
narrative threads are linked in terms of the idea of news organisations being “compensated”. But as we explained before, the ultimate imperatives are different. In the face of Australia’s new legislation for instance, Google blinked and swiftly cut deals with a range of news organisations. Facebook’s first instinct was to pull the plug on news. It’s fair to
assume therefore that Google News Showcase may continue to grow and find purchase among major publishers, whatever its attendant problems, while Facebook’s arrangements with news publishers around the world will find their way to a natural denouement.
Of more concern perhaps, is the fact that referrals to news organisations through Facebook and Instagram are only likely to go down with the company’s increasing “TikTokisation”. Despite the ongoing attempt at reinvention, Mark Stenberg notes for Adweek that Facebook remains a critical tool for news publishers. The website remains their primary source of social referral traffic, said Bonnie Ray, Vice President of Data Science at the web analytics firm Chartbeat. In May 2022, for example, 87% of traffic to sites in the Chartbeat network that came from social referrers came from Facebook.
And while the volume of referral traffic coming from Facebook to publishers has dropped since reaching a peak in 2020, the amount of total traffic Facebook sends publishers has increased compared to the pre-pandemic era—roughly 11% from May 2019 to May 2022, according to Tania Yuki, the chief marketing officer and EVP of digital
at Comscore. In early 2018, Stenberg reports, Facebook accounted for nearly 25% of publishers’ traffic. That figure has steadily dropped, and the platform now accounts for between 18% and 20% of total external traffic, a percentage that has held fairly steady over the last 12 to 18 months. Referrals to news via social media may be declining in general but Facebook still remains the most important source of such referrals.
A WORLD WITHOUT FACEBOOK
Let’s consider the role of Facebook as it relates to the news ecosystem from a different perspective? What would happen if Facebook just disappeared? We have had brief glimpses of this hypothetical in recent years, first in August 2018 when Facebook was down for about 45 minutes and then in October 2021, when the social media site was offline for a staggering six hours.
The baby outage in 2018 was enough for the analytics site chartbeat to gather some interesting data. “What would the world look like without Facebook? Chartbeat had a glimpse into that on Aug. 3, 2018, when Facebook went down for 45 minutes and traffic patterns across the web changed in an instant. What did people do? According to our data, they went directly to publishers’ mobile apps and sites (as well as to search engines) to get their information fix.” Josh Schwartz wrote for Chartbeat. This is good news for
publishers, he added.
Similar trends were reported from around the world during the larger outage of 2021. “When Facebook and Instagram shut down on Monday evening, Danes instead used their smartphones to control Danish websites and news media. As clicks from social media stopped, the number of direct visits to Danish news media and websites increased,” the Danish Media Association announced in a release.
“Between 1900 and 2300 hours on Monday evening, when Facebook and Instagram were down, Danish media experienced 19% more visits and 40% more page views compared to the previous Monday. This corresponds to well over 500,000 more visits across Danish media and 5,500,000 more page views.”
Chartbeat reported similar trends, finding that net traffic to pages across the web was up by 38% compared to the same time the previous week. This is not of course restricted to news sites but they no doubt benefitted.
How do we interpret this data? One possibility is to frame it as a binary. If news sites depend on Facebook for traffic then it should follow that a Facebook outage should mean they get less traffic. Instead they got more. Therefore, they don’t really need Facebook.
The reality however, according to media analyst Adam Tinworth is far more complicated. Many publishers saw a significant spike in traffic that night. But many didn’t. But some saw some substantial declines. The analysis on the outage was not really clear on what type of publishers actually benefited. And to paraphrase Tinworth’s larger point on the outage and the resulting changes in internet behaviour, Facebook is like a giant sponge of attention. When it switches off, it is natural that the attention is disgorged across other parts of the internet.
At least part of the challenge for news organisations is to compete in this new attention economy even as the rules are being rewritten. If Meta does indeed turn both of its biggest social media networks into TikTok clones, meaning they will no longer be social first, but driven by what’s more entertaining, traffic for traditional news will decline even more. And it may call in the short term for an experimentation with new formats.
“As Meta’s engagement data will rise, traffic that Facebook and Instagram have been sending to websites will dramatically decline. Yes, I think this will be dramatic especially for news sites that share important hard news that’s not entertaining. Unless they make it into a TikTok video,” David Tvrdon writes for The Fix, making it clear that he is only
half joking.
Tvrdon predicts that for news organisations there will be another pivot to video. It’s an analysis that Tinworth also agrees with.
“In the medium term, getting your social video skills up to speed, through training, experimentation — or hiring talent — is likely to become ever more important to getting attention from Meta’s existing platforms. Meta’s own focus is drifting away from them, as it tries to skate to where
the puck might be: the metaverse future it’s hoping to own,” he writes.
“Those skills are worth developing in-house because they’re portable across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and, of course, TikTok.” Still, as Tvrdon writes, news publishers will
look for alternative traffic sources and arrive at the conclusion that there is only one major left – Google Search. There is still Twitter, of course, but for most that’s tiny.
“If I was a young journalism student at the moment, I would focus on becoming an SEO specialist. Journalism skills combined with SEO expertise will make these people very sought after,” Tvrdon writes.
Lastly, Tinworth notes that there are some potentially serious consequences for this shift of focus from Facebook in terms of grants given to fund research and innovation also disappearing. In particular, Tinworth flags high level work on revenue models being done by organisations like WAN-IFRA in partnership with a Facebook Accelerator programme. Also to consider is the future of programmes like Facebook’s Community New Programme where the company funds local journalism. In truth, there are several other similar programmes around the world that receive Facebook funding.
Ultimately, as we move into a new era it looks very much like one of the weirder partnerships of modern times – the social network that was supposed to be all about connecting with friends and the news industry that was all about looking at the world beyond one’s bubble –is simply untenable as a business proposition for both parties. There are more questions than answers as we move forward, but move forward we must
THE Innovation in News Media World Report is published every year by INNOVATION Media Consulting in association with WAN-IFRA, The report is co-edited by INNOVATION President, Juan Señor, and Senior Consultant Jayant Sriram