Turns Out Social Media Is Driving Less And Less Traffic To Media Orgs
from the can-you-have-a-link-tax-without-links? dept
As everyone continues to demand that social media companies pay news orgs for the crime of sending them traffic, it’s becoming clear that fewer and fewer people are using social media for news any more, and social media sites simply are not a major driver of traffic to news orgs anyway.
The PressGazette has had a series of stories lately highlighting how social media is increasingly less relevant in driving traffic to media orgs. After looking at where traffic to media orgs is coming from, the PressGazette finds that, in basically every case, social media is sending less and less traffic to media sites. And that’s especially true for the social media sites most commonly associated with news.
The PressGazette notes that traffic has plummeted from Facebook to media orgs:
And that’s equally true of Twitter referral traffic:
And while this decline clearly predates Elon Musk, it is notable that he still insists that Twitter is an important site for the media. That appears to not really be true based on the data in these articles.
But, still, the larger point is that the whole concept being pushed in these link tax bills, such as the CJPA here in California, is that social media companies are somehow unfairly stealing revenue from news orgs. When, from what we can see, it looks like social media companies don’t much care about news. It’s not driving much usage at all.
It’s possible this is why the media orgs are so desperate for these corrupt link tax government handouts, but it really suggests that the reasoning behind them, that social media is unfairly “profiting” from news, is simply not supported by the data at all.
Filed Under: cjpa, link tax, referral traffic, social media
Companies: facebook, meta, twitter
Comments on “Turns Out Social Media Is Driving Less And Less Traffic To Media Orgs”
Pro-CJPA argument is ridiculous
There is no shortage of craven political actors these days.
The pro-CJPA people are among the worst.
Pro-CJPA people: “When Facebook links to news sites, it is ‘stealing’ their revenue. We must tax Facebook so that the news media gets their ‘stolen’ revenue back!”
Also … Pro-CJPA people: “How dare Facebook stop linking to news sites! They want to ban journalism!”
How can people make this incoherent argument with a straight face?
I’d have some respect for a person who reacted to Facebook stopping links to news sites with “Good for Facebook. I’m glad that it will no longer ‘steal’ news revenue.” That person is still supporting a bad law, but at least they are coherent.
Re:
Because they’ve done it before. Every download is a lost sale, and the like.
It also helps that other people in other countries, like Spain in the early 2010s, also made this argument against Google. Sure, they lost that gambit when Google promised to not include their articles and content in their search results and therefore not send them traffic for which Google would owe them money. But it set a precedent for taking bites at the apple.
Re: Re: It gets better
That law in Spain includes a provision that states that you must charge a non zero price per referral you receive from for example Google.
The reason for that is that the same people who pushed this law in Spain tried before in Germany and basically every single news organization there made an agreement with Google (and other big referrers) that Google (and others) would have to pay nothing. Took about two weeks before the revenue dip became that noticeable.
In Spain in less then a month the news organizations were begging the government to repeal the law for basically the same reason.
Do I need to mention that the exact same people responsible for these two laws have been trying to pull the same stunt on EU level?
That is impressive timing. I was just publishing a report about Facebook test blocking news links in Canada. Nice find. I’ll probably do a write up on this tomorrow. Both Meta and Alphabet have said in their own hearings that news matters little to their business model, so I needed some fresh data to re-prove the point.
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Alas, your user link points to a game review site. Perhaps you should change that.
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Today was a publish heavy day from multiple sections of my site. 4th post down now and you’ll see my article on there. Normally, there’s only one or two posts on the site per day and it’s a little easier to see the news articles. The article in question has a picture of Gritty, you can’t miss it. Alternatively, here’s the link to my article
Look at the data
There seems to have been a modest decline in social media referrals, but the study you linked still shows that Google and Facebook alone account for (give-or-take) half of the total referral traffic, with Google alone accounting for a third. I’d also be interested to see how this breaks down to UK vs US, and to smaller vs larger news sites.
So riddle me this:
I’m an uninformed person when it comes to how social media actually works, both behind the scenes and what the user sees (and expects to see, or expects to have work). Inform me, please.
Are we talking about a page where Facebook actually posts a bunch links to news sites, most likely picked by algorithm? Or are we talking about some individual private person posting a link within his own portfolio (or should that be ‘a profile’)? Because if it’s a private party, a simple user, then Facebook et al are off the hook, via Section 230 if nothing else – they didn’t “drive the traffic”, the user did.
And we all know what Sectiion 230 is supposed to do, right? (For those uninformed about 230, it’s goal is to force plaintiffs to sue the correct party (the one who wrote and posted something), not the carrier of that party’s scribblings.)
So, I suppose it’s possible that Facebook could go through each and every posting made by each and everyone of their Billion+ users, and weed out links from those posts, but that presents another pair of nightmares: A) time and computer power; and B) invasion of privacy. I sure wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of the department head responsible for this kind of action!
Any takers, please?
Re:
are we talking about a page where Facebook actually posts a bunch links to news sites, most likely picked by algorithm? Or are we talking about some individual private person posting a link within his own portfolio (or should that be ‘a profile’)?
Both, and any other theoretical situation in which a hyperlink to a domain of a covered news org exists or comes to exist on a domain of a covered social media org.
“Drives the traffic” is an irrelevance here, that’s a talking point trying to justify or not justify passing the law, not the law itself.
The law merely defines hyperlink, and says hyperlinks cost money if they point to certain domains from certain other domains (or variations on that theme). Much more like sales tax, for example. It’s not really a question of who is liable for the contents and uses of the sold item, it’s just a tax on the sale. The law defines who is responsible for collecting and remanding the tax, regardless of who is legally liable for the outcomes of the sale itself.
that presents another pair of nightmares: A) time and computer power; and B) invasion of privacy.
This is actually about the easiest thing facebook does in moderation. In contrast to most of their moderation efforts, they merely have to ascertain if a hyperlink goes to a well-defined set of domains, which is trivial in both time and computing power compared to their usual moderation efforts, and technically has less privacy concerns as well since it requires no further context.
People are tired of the news. The more control of the media shrinks, the worse it gets. Tucker Carlson is a canary in a coal mine.
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This has been an ever growing consensus that I’ve seen over the decade I have been running my site. When I talk to people, sometimes the news crops up. I sometimes tell people that, hey, I have my own news site and I uncover lots of stuff the that major media outlets don’t cover.
In response, I get told things like, “Well, I don’t really follow the news” or “the news is too depressing” or even “I avoid the news, though.” As someone whose primary passion is writing news articles, comments like that are downright painful to hear.
Luckily, I correctly guessed early on that if people aren’t interested in the news, then some will probably be more interested in something like video games or music. As a result, I managed to get a couple of additional people interested in what I do that would otherwise turn up their nose to what I do.
I probably won’t ever give up on writing news entirely, but I also recognize that there is an increasingly diminished number of people interested in this stuff, so some degree of pivoting away from what I’m normally into is pretty much a necessary thing to do for the sake of survival.
So, when I see statistics like in TFA suggesting people are turning away from news in greater numbers, it’s not entirely surprising to me. It matches what I see on the ground. I don’t believe it’s healthy that people are turning away from this stuff because someone has to pay attention to the corruption in government, but at the same time, there’s that constant that you have to listen to your customers.
Re: Re:
It’s hilarious that outside of the US, there are different reasons as to why people don’t want to read the news.
In Japan, it’s because the news orgs don’t actually dare criticize the government and hide the unpleasant but necessary stuff by not reporting on it.
In China and a few other places, it’s because the news is pretty much the propaganda arm of the government. In some other places, it’s because they chase profit over actual reporting.
It’s all moot, though. The age of propaganda masquerading as news is here. And Rupert Murdoch is to blame.
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I used to have a newspaper. I gave up on it since about 15 years ago I noticed that it had devolved into a republisher of press releases at the national and higher level and didn’t even do even the most cursory fact checking on those. When your newspaper literally goes Orwell on you due to that it is time to leave. Didn’t help that most of the newspapers are owned by the same conglomerate and any newspaper of them would have the same problem due to sharing the national and international press desks.
For television news, I have the internet (where I also have access to local news) and usually before that it is on television.
Re: Re: Re:
I’ve noticed similar things with the local newspaper around here. There used to be three in my community, but the numbers shrank to one weekly paper. One of the things that was complained about was a constant lack of care in the product. The paper was filled with typos, and a large portion of those papers were simply reprinting stories from wire services: namely the Canadian Press and Associated Press. To make matters worse, the newspapers were heavy into pushing right wing agenda’s on top of it all.
So, it was probably little surprise to me that after multiple years of this, readership declined. Two of the papers went bankrupt. The third went from a daily to a weekly newspaper. What’s more, they pulled what Cable TV has done for years and jacked the prices up to make up for the loss in revenues when people dropped their paid subscriptions. The question on a lot of people’s minds right now is how long that paper will last before they, too, close their doors for good. Seeing a newspaper these days has become something of a novelty.
The only reason I have access to traditional broadcast TV news is because someone else in my household is paying for the subscription. I flatly said that I wouldn’t necessarily miss TV is the subscription was dropped. On occasion, something of interest pops up, but beyond that, it’s hard to really justify paying for TV subscriptions when there is nothing to watch.
The value of the media from larger players has dropped considerably in the last decade. It appears that the activity of shovelling out whatever out the door is finally catching up to the larger players. There are, of course, independently run sites like this that can easily trounce the quality of news found on traditional sources, but large portions of the audience seems to be thinking that if the big players can’t keep their attention, then the whole sector is just not worth supporting – smaller players trying to make a difference or not.
Reminds me of the Queen Mary.
You know, the ship that’s been docked in Long Beach for decades? Yeah, well, back in the 1990s, when everybody was building a website for the first time, the Queen Mary website actually stated that it was prohibited to link to the site. Yes, you read that right: prohibited to post a link to their website on any other website. I have no idea why (or what the “or else” might have led to), but I’m sure the misguided thinking behind it used the same ludicrous illogic and/or anti-tech paranoia driving these ridiculous link tax bills.
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