Latest Data: Canadian Media Needs Facebook More Than Facebook Needs Canadian Media
from the didn't-we-cover-this-already? dept
As we’ve discussed widely, the entire premise of various link tax bills has never made sense. They’re pushed by the media and politicians insisting that Google and Facebook are unfairly “profiting” off of their news. Except that’s never made any sense at all to anyone who looked at the situation carefully.
First of all, links to news has never been particularly important to either Google or Facebook. It’s always been a small part of what they do, and almost always not a key part of monetizing anything, but just as an extra feature (Google, famously, barely monetizes Google News at all).
Second, as we just discussed on our recent podcast, in the pre-internet era, the largest expense for newspapers was printing and distribution, and the internet basically removed the vast majority of those expenses, and gave them a system to do both for basically nothing.
Third, Google and Facebook were then sending traffic to these news sites for free. And we know that the news sites valued that free traffic, because if they didn’t they (1) could easily block it, and (2) wouldn’t hire SEO and social media experts to help try to get more such traffic. Indeed, there was tremendous empirical evidence suggesting that the news orgs got way more benefit from Facebook and Google sending them traffic than either Facebook or Google got from having links to news on their platform.
And, now, with Canada’s C-18, we’re seeing even more evidence making this point. As you’ll recall, C-18 is Canada’s version of a link tax that was signed into law earlier this year, and which will go into effect soon. However, both Meta and Google have said that they will respond to this by blocking links to news in Canada, and Meta has already done so.
And while Canadian media orgs and politicians completely lost their shit about this, effectively claiming that Meta linking to news sites is “theft” and not linking to news sites is corrupt, you’d think that maybe someone in the Canadian government would realize just how bad all this looks.
The latest is that, once again, the actual market is showing that the news orgs appear to need Facebook and Google way more than Facebook or Google need news. First there was a report showing that the lack of news links in Canada did literally nothing to Facebook’s traffic.
Daily active users of Facebook and time spent on the app in Canada have stayed roughly unchanged since parent company Meta started blocking news there at the start of August, according to data shared by Similarweb, a digital analytics company that tracks traffic on websites and apps, at Reuters’ request.
Another analytics firm, Data.ai, likewise told Reuters that its data was not showing any meaningful change to usage of the platform in Canada in August.
So, all this talk about how Facebook needed news to keep users on the site… the reality is that, no, they did not.
Of course, if we check in on the other side of the equation, we see that maybe the news orgs actually kinda relied on that traffic more than Facebook did. There was a CNN report claiming a “dramatic drop” in traffic from Meta to news orgs, but that’s to be expected, given it was going from whatever it was to basically zero. The question is how much of their traffic does that represent.
A quick look around at Canadian news orgs suggests that (unlike Facebook’s traffic), the traffic to news orgs in Canada has mostly (though not entirely) declined since the block went into effect in early August. The Toronto Star showed a decline in visitors from July to August of 1.6 million visits, according to Similarweb. The NationalPost was down about 300k visits. The TorontoSun was down about 500k visits. CTV News also lost about 500k visits.
Of course, not all news orgs saw their traffic decline. Two of the biggest actually saw a bump up in traffic: CBC.ca and the Globe and Mail both saw their traffic jump up a bit, perhaps because as Canadians look for other sources for news, they were more likely to go directly to two of the most well known news sites for Canadians.
Along those lines, another report, this time from Insider, notes that those Canadian news orgs with apps saw app usage increase in August:
Yet, because of the loss of access on Facebook and Instagram, several major news outlets in Canada are seeing an uptick in downloads and usage of their own apps, according to an analysis from Apptopia. The apps of CTV, and Globe and Mail, as well as French language outlet La Presse, saw thousands more downloads in August compared to July, when content was still available on Meta’s platforms.
The Globe and Mail in August saw a 98% increase in app downloads and a 27% increase in daily users; CTV News saw a 157% increase in app downloads and an 83% increase in daily usage; La Presse saw a 32% increase in app downloads and an 8% increase in usage; and The National Post’s downloads were up almost 10%, with daily usage up 3%. Meanwhile, CBC News saw downloads and daily usage remain relatively flat.
All in all, it looks like maybe it doesn’t much matter if Meta doesn’t link to news sites. Of course, you can argue this is a good result for basically everyone involved: getting rid of news doesn’t harm Facebook, and the media get more direct traffic. Though, of course, if you listen to Canadian politicians you’d think it was the end of the world. PM Justin Trudeau acted as if this is all about “corporate profits,” but that literally makes no sense.
Again, as everyone tried to explain to Canadian politicians from the beginning, none of this makes sense. It requires paying for something that should never be paid for, so it’s entirely reasonable to just stop hosting news links. It’s not about “corporate profits,” it’s about recognizing the problems of paying for links fundamentally.
Either way, though, the early results suggest that Facebook made the right decision here, while the Canadian government looks extremely foolish.
Filed Under: c-18, canada, journalistm, link tax, news
Companies: facebook, google, meta
Comments on “Latest Data: Canadian Media Needs Facebook More Than Facebook Needs Canadian Media”
time for global A/B testing?
Meta and Google might be curious to see if this phenomenon can be replicated worldwide. The Canadian government accidentally forced them to do an A/B test of sorts. Maybe they should set test up for every country and see what the impact would be of removing links. Just to make sure everyone gets the picture.
Re:
It has begun, EU top of list
https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-drop-facebook-news-tab-some-european-countries-2023-09-05/
Ew, dammit, I need a shower after reading that.
if you consider
What Google and others are really doing,
They are cataloging all the articles a site has done.
THAT is HUGE.
How many site will have the ability to reference Every story from the last 10+ year?
having hts site location from google into your system is Soo cool, that you dont need to create your OWN reference section.
Unless you want to waste 1T of space on a drive?
So yeah, as predicted , the Canadian link-tax bill ends up benefiting the biggest news organizations at the expense of smaller ones — it just turns out that the bar between “big” and “small” news outlets is set a little higher than expected.
Re: trick in the game
If its local, its not covered.
If it international, they get it all.
There might be a total of 6 international news agencies. And papers and TV pay for those services to give you world wide news.
1 news agency has to many TV and newspaper shops under his belt to cover the Aussies, the USA and a share of the EU.
He can pay 1 time to get the int news and spread it to all points.
One thing I don’t see in the article (because it would be difficult to acquire), is the absolute change in traffic to news sites in Canada. … and broken down into “has an app” and “doesn’t have an app” categories.
’cause this may be yet another “the little guys lose” story.
Re:
That would be a very difficult thing to quantify. Some of the smaller outlets actually intentionally avoid having their content on things like Google and Facebook while paywalling everything. They then just rely on oldschool marketing to sell newspapers afterwards. It is apparently possible in some locations in Canada to pull this off while actually getting a viable business model running. In the process, they just so happen to be insulated from the link tax debacle. So, if they don’t happen to have an app, the changes happening online doesn’t affect them at all.
Yes, there are lots of outlets that got negatively impacted by this and don’t have an app. That much is true. The problem is that the business models across all smaller outlets aren’t exactly uniform, making quantifying such a thing difficult.
Not Everyone Was Impacted By This
One curious impact the link blocking has had was the fact that not all outlets got the boot from platforms. There are provisions in the bill that disqualify a news organization from eligibility if they ‘focus on a particular topic’. I was kind of clinging to this provision among others, hoping that I won’t get screwed on my own site.
It turns out, I was correct.
My site managed to survive the news link apocalypse. In fact, pretty much every tech news site I looked for survived this as well. Mobile Syrup, Arstechnica, Polygon, and Kotaku, among others, are still humming along nicely on Facebook from a Canadian users perspective. I suspect specialized news in other areas are equally unaffected by this.
My legal theory turned out to be sound after all – though last month was still scary as fnck as I stared down the potential end to my career.
So, same as what happened in Spain? Everyone gets screwed but the smaller publishers get absolutely demolished, leaving people with either the major publishers or nothing.
It’s hardly a wonder that publishers keep pulling this stunt in different countries, no matter what they end up better off.
Hey, Trudeau.
It IS absolutely about corporate profits.
Rupert Murdoch’s.
Australia managed to pass THEIR version of this shit law, largely funded by, guess who?
RUPERT MURDOCH’S NEWS CORP.
Re:
There’s effectively no News Corp enterprises in Canada, so while this might have been Murdoch’s idea….it wasn’t going to benefit him in Canada.
Re: Re:
While that’s true, the reason why the law was even considered in Canada was because it worked. In Australia.
And people love to imitate success.
Obviously...
The major Canadian news organizations have friends in Ottawa, but Google and Facebook don’t. So news orgs thought, since thye were so much worse than Google at monetizing visits, “let’s make the government get Google to pay us money instead”.
Now they are advertising on the radio “You can’t get your news from facebook, Canadian news is being blocked. So get the CTV news app instead.” Sorry I hav 4 pages of apps on my phone. I don’t need more. (And… the only news I pay to subscribe is the NYTimes).
Besides, the Canadian news organizations have been descending into the pit of irrelevance anyway, as they cut staff, rewrite the same wire stories as everyone else, and paywall what they can.
What’s interesting is that the decision who is news is more often automated by Google and Facebook. thebeaverton.org is a humour site like The Onion, but its tagline was “North America’s Trusted Source in News” which meant automated filters removed it until it complained because “New”.
Another fun fact, complaints that when an entire northern town – Yellowknife – had to be evacuated along with surrounding towns, due to forest fires recently, people complained that updates on the fire and evacuation situation were blocked by Facebook and Google where people would normally go for news. Well… this is what the government asked for, what do you expect? “Pay up or shut uP” means “shut up” is an option too.
Whats next for Canada? Maybe Taxing people who live and have citizenship in other countries?
Parody sites still published?
Two of the largest parody news sites the chaser and betoota advocate were not affected when they did this in Australia. Blocking emergency services is not great.
I have no sympathy when someone like the Canadian minister of heritage complains that big, mean Zuckerburg refuses to link to Canadian news – especially given the harm that’s being done to in-region US OTA TV stations by Canadian cable companies in my neck of the woods.
I’m 45 miles WNW of Watertown NY near the 1000 Islands region. There used to be four or five Canadian OTA TV networks transmitting to Kingston-Deseronto-Bancroft ON. All but one of them have taken their signal permanently off the air. Meanwhile, I’m picking up the equivalent of 22 digital subchannels from Watertown-Carthage NY which serve this community (or the few with a good all-channel outdoor antenna) quite well. So basically, tiny pop-132485 Kingston ON lives in the digital shadow of its larger, more powerful pop-27000 American neighbor or neighbour.
What do the Canadian cable companies do? Since they (or the Canadian government entities who regulate them) really want the Watertown OTA stations to fail, they remove all of the US LPTV stations. Bye-bye NBC Watertown. They then remove all the digital subchannels beyond .1 – so bye bye Watertown NY Fox, bye-bye Create and World and PBS Kids and all those extra goodies which a lot of digital compression and a bit of American ingenuity managed to squeeze onto the same stations. Bye-bye HD and widescreen from any of the in-region US stations. Want the US OTA HD feeds back? Here, have this Detroit station (400 mi away). Want NBC and Fox back? Here, have this Buffalo station (160 mi away). Then watch Canadian stations duplicate content already on the in-region US border station and tamper with the US signal to substitute their own garbage, isn’t “signal substitution” as a form of legalised theft so clever? Heck, come to think of it, Canadian dish and cable providers aren’t required to carry the US border stations at all, even if they’re the only thing keeping OTA TV watchable (if one expects more than one network here in 2023). Much of the signal tampering has been ongoing since the 1970s (when the CRTC managed to put KCND 12 Pembina ND out of business by locking them out of the Winnipeg market) and is only getting worse with the digital transition.
At one point in 2009, Rogers cable attempted to drop PBS member stations WQLN (Erie PA into London ON) and WPBS-TV (WNPI Norwood NY into Ottawa ON) entirely, which would have either put the station out of business or ended local program creation by pulling the station from the largest city in their respective coverage areas. The Canadian government didn’t even require that the stations be informed this was about to be attempted; this disgraceful attack on a pair of non-profit educators was only stopped due to massive public backlash in the target communities.
Since then, the concentration of control over TV in Canada has only gotten worse. No politician dares stand up against the telecom duopolies, who own both pipes and content, because of the damage they could do. CTV managed to single-handedly destroy Patrick Brown’s almost-certain coronation as premier of Ontario by broadcasting factually-wrong “news”; he’s now at Brampton city hall instead of running the province. No idea what he did to deserve it, but with one person (Ed Rogers) controlling 40% of all English-language cable TV in Canada, these people aren’t just loathed… they’re feared.
And yes, the same government that thinks it’s just fine for Canadian cable TV monopolies to tamper with US OTA signals in Canada suddenly loses their marbles when Facebook (of all people) refuses to link to some random Canuck news site. Too bad, so sad. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving lot. Tampering with WPBS (a charity) is right up there with robbing a food bank. There’s a special place in Hell.
Makes sense
You don’t understand: politicians aren’t going to admit to making a mistake unless they’re absolutely forced to. While we know that the PM is making no sense, most voters don’t. And, in the end, that’s all he cares about.