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The Media Social Networks

What Happens When Major Online Platforms Lower Traffic to News Sites? (yahoo.com) 101

"The major online platforms are breaking up with news," reports the New York Times: Campbell Brown, Facebook's top news executive, said this month that she was leaving the company. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram's Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news. Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less dependable, making publishers more wary of their reliance on the search giant. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off... Some executives of the largest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it is worth because it generates polarized debates...

Publishers seem resigned to the idea that traffic from the big tech companies will not return to what it once was. Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark. Many news companies have struggled to survive after the tech companies threw the industry's business model into upheaval more than a decade ago. One lifeline was the traffic — and, by extension, advertising — that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter. Now that traffic is disappearing. Top news sites got about 11.5% of their web traffic in the United States from social networks in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. By September this year, it was down to 6.5%...

The sharp decline in referral traffic from social media platforms over the past two years has hit all news publishers, including The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal noticed a decline starting about 18 months ago, according to a recording of a September staff meeting obtained by the Times. "We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our distribution," Emma Tucker, the Journal's editor-in-chief, told the newsroom in the meeting...

Google cut some members of its news partnership team in September, and this week it laid off as many as 45 workers from its Google News team, the Alphabet Workers Union said. (The Information, a tech news website, reported the Google News layoffs earlier.) "We've made some internal changes to streamline our organization," Jenn Crider, a Google spokesperson, said in a statement... Jaffer Zaidi [Google's vice president of global news partnerships], wrote in an internal memo reviewed by the Times that the team would be adopting more artificial intelligence. "We had to make some difficult decisions to better position our team for what lies ahead," he wrote...

Privately, a number of publishers have discussed what a post-Google traffic future may look like and how to better prepare if Google's AI products become more popular and further bury links to news publications.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

What Happens When Major Online Platforms Lower Traffic to News Sites?

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  • by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @11:58AM (#63942133)

    Musk has gone out of his way to turn Twitter into a disinformation site. He recently removed the headlines of news stories so people can't see what they're clicking on. In addition, he repeatedly lies about covid vaccines, such as when LeBron James' son collapsed on the court and said there was probably a connection [bbc.com] between the collapse and getting the vaccine.

    Right now Musk is considering stopping Twitter in Europe because of European regulations regarding misinformation [bbc.com].

    He also recently removed [fortune.com] The New York Times' verified tick because they were truthfully reporting news and correcting misinformation. Something he clearly doesn't want on Twitter.

    So yeah, Twitter is not a good example to use since what's happening is deliberate and calculated.

    • by wdr1 ( 31310 ) * <wdr1@nOsPAm.pobox.com> on Saturday October 21, 2023 @12:19PM (#63942181) Homepage Journal

      I'm very pro-vax. I was double boosted & got the 2023 booster the day after it was available.

      However, I really hate this false dichotomy that vaccines are either poison or they're perfect. Both sides are wrong. They're medicine. Medicine almost always comes with tradeoffs.

      We need to stop painting questions about side effects, and things like the benefits for demographics as "anti-vaxx".

      Let's stick with science. Science welcomes questions. That's how we learn.

      • by skam240 ( 789197 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @12:53PM (#63942219)

        The problem with Musks comments that the above is referencing though is that Musk had no real reason to assume that Lebron's son's heart attack was due to the covid vaccine outside of playing into a popular conspiracy. No one in the media even knew if he was vaxxed or not at that point if I remember correctly.

        If he had waited for proper information which then showed a possible link to the covid vaccine and then he posted we wouldnt be talking about this.

      • by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @01:29PM (#63942295) Journal

        However, I really hate this false dichotomy that vaccines are either poison or they're perfect. Both sides are wrong.

        The only people claiming they are perfect are antivaxxers setting up a straw man. Fuck off with the "both sides" bullshit.

        We need to stop painting questions about side effects, and things like the benefits for demographics as "anti-vaxx".

        Not if the person asking them is JAQing off or using questions to spread disinformation by repeatedly raising questions about things which are flat out false, Tucker Carlson style.

        Let's stick with science. Science welcomes questions.

        Science welcomes honest questions from people wanting to learn answers. Science does not welcome JAQoffs with an axe to grind.

        • by Pascoea ( 968200 )
          Couple things... First, thank you for helping me learn something. I had no idea what a JAQoff was, that google search ended less poorly than I thought it would.

          Science welcomes honest questions from people wanting to learn answers. Science does not welcome JAQoffs with an axe to grind.

          Nice summation. The "honest" part is key here. Tucker Carlson is a fantastic example of this (Man, I don't miss hearing from him on a daily/weekly basis) because that is exactly his style. He never really SAYS stuff that isn't true. He just ASKS about controversial in a way that leads his dim-witted followers to come to the desired conclusion, o

      • The problem in general is that people tend to think of other people as clones, and that their bodies are identical on the inside. Some people have the same complications with the anual flu vaccines, but most do not. The Covid vaccine is no different than the flu shot but media likes to get all sensational when something goes wrong, especially when it's someone related to a high profie person. But what Musk is doing is highly manipulative, and his platform is just as reliable as "Weekly World News" when it
      • by sjames ( 1099 )

        Calling any question at all anti-vax is a serious over-reaction, probably in part inspires by the modern tactic of "just asking questions". While the latter usually is the case, it's not ALWAYS the case and the distinction must be made.

      • Anti-vaxx almost always means anti-science.
    • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @12:20PM (#63942187)

      Define 'major online platform' first. If it includes the usual response of Facebook/Meta/YouTube/Alphabet/Twitter/X, then you should ask yourself the next obvious question.

      When in the hell should we have ever considered any of those platforms an actual source of valid news?

      Social media reaps what it sows. That's not where fact and truth live and breathe easily. Common F. Sense understood that several billion in clickbait revenue ago.

      • When in the hell should we have ever considered any of those platforms an actual source of valid news?

        What is valid news other than something that someone tells you which you take at face value? Do you independently verify every story you read? If not what makes you trust one source over another? What make the posts of one group of people different from those of companies who employ people? What makes one company valid over another? What makes one story valid over another?

        The list of companies you mention don't create content. They repost it, from others. They are a source of connection. One post on X is fr

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by quall ( 1441799 )

      What a load of "misinformation". Musk removed the NYT's verified tick because he started charging for ticks and the NYT declined to pay. He later gave it back to them along with a few others for free. What does this have to do with whether their reporting is truthful or not, especially after you've just stated that he also allows misinformation?

      Your use of "truthful" is quite odd. Remember when 12 people stormed the white house while others protested outside, and they called it an insurrection and a riot? T

    • by vlad30 ( 44644 )
      Dis/Mis -information happens on all sides of the argument/politics/discussions etc. The problem is that people in control try to censor information even when it is correct if they don't like or it doesn't fit with the narrative.

      Claiming something is misinformation is an easy way for censorship and to curb freedom of speech It would be better to let them speak and like on slashdot allow people to counter that argument with facts. unfortunately even slashdot has some members who will mod down a fact and oth

    • Musk is correct and you are wrong. NYT lost its check mark for consistent false reporting, plain and simple. It was a measured move as well, as NTY Health and NYT World kept their verified status. https://www.timesnownews.com/w... [timesnownews.com]
    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      So NYT hired a reporter. He was an open Islamist and publicly talked about his hatred of Jews. Managed to publish a hilarious article on NYT about Jews and Hitler. Brouhaha was so big that even as woke as NYT is, it had to fire him for being a raging anti-semite. Mind you, after article passed the editorial process at NYT, telling you that there are people quite high up in NYT's editorial structure at the very least who are in full throated agreement with what Islamists think should be done to Jews and thin

  • AP/Reuters feeds (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jonsmirl ( 114798 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @11:58AM (#63942135) Homepage

    Would it work if Google/FB/etc just paid big bucks for the main news feeds like AP/Reuters and simply stopped redirecting news traffic to the local newspaper websites? It is not very productive to click on links to endless paywalls for hundreds of different news sites. The payment to the wire services would then be shared back to the sources.

    • The payment to the wire services would then be shared back to the sources.

      LOL. Right. Nice fantasy world you have there.

    • CIA would love that - they have agents manipulating both.

      In theory reinstating the Smith-Mundt Act could help with this.

      Assuming they would obey the law or suffer consequences otherwise (doubtful).

    • by keltor ( 99721 ) *
      What they wanted was the news sources to pay THEM for the linking to the news sources. Now they just want to be done with "news" period, mostly due to the rise of disinformation and "legitimate" news orgs like Fox News and CNN spreading their own politicized disinformation.
    • Where do you think news stories come from? Every news story starts out as local news. They feed the larger news organisations. Without them, there would only be statements from official sources (AKA PR from spokespersons).
    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Would it work if Google/FB/etc just paid big bucks for the main news feeds like AP/Reuters and simply stopped redirecting news traffic to the local newspaper websites? It is not very productive to click on links to endless paywalls for hundreds of different news sites. The payment to the wire services would then be shared back to the sources.

      This is close to what the actual problem is.

      Papers wanted it both ways, for the tech companies to bring them users AND for the tech companies to pay for it.

      So they went and got a bunch of rent seeking laws passed forcing Google, FB, the app formerly known as Twitter, et al. to pay the publishers, notably NewsCorp, to index their content. This is the natural result of that, traffic has an actual cost, so the routing cost is increased to compensate. Now the papers are crying that they cant have their ca

      • Could the monetization model for newspapers simply be wrong? A different model would be to design newspaper websites only for paying customers and offer free trials if you enter credit card info. Then for stories of national interest push them into AP/Reuters and get paid via revenue share from the fees Google/FB/X pay into the wire service. Now it is up to the local newspaper whether or not to push the story to the wire service.

        This model implies significant changes. The newspaper web sites would stop or

  • by nadass ( 3963991 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @11:59AM (#63942137)
    There's a chasm of difference between linking to non-native content (contents 'hosted' elsewhere), scraping those contents for local caching and distribution (whether it's Google's AMP or an image with metadata to direct traffic to the hosted content), and voluntary syndication of your content (proactively making copies of news articles available for others to host, which places like Associated Press and Reuters proactive do).

    The distinctions have been blurred lines for a long while, and there hasn't been any reliable DRM processes around content on the web since forever. With that in mind, publishers should appreciate the redistribution method of syndication rather than "hoard" advertising and platform interactivity for themselves.

    In other words, news publishers shouldn't depend on any outside traffic to drive their performance metrics! Any third-party interaction with a publisher's content (consumption of content from a cached source like third-party sites or traffic derived thereupon) should all be treated as "bonus" not immediately relevant to their business model.

    Does this imply that publishers' budgets and models should get adjusted? Possibly. Their content interaction projections should definitely get adjusted, however, to reflect minimal native subscribers -- it's not like WSJ is "booming" in subscriber growth, but they know their core audience and everything else is just gravy; same goes for Bloomberg News, and other specialty news outlets. That's how it should be structured. Not a one-size-fits-all news outlet model. That just doesn't work.

    /rant (possibly about nothing)
  • I'm ashamed to see a headline like "What Happens When Major Online Platforms Lower Traffic to News Sites?"

    This is exactly the sort of BS they are combating, irrelevant premises.

  • Cause and effect (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @12:00PM (#63942143)

    It's not the 'polarizing effect' on social media, social media loves that because it gets hate-clicks.

    It's everyone attempting to monetize every click - social media isn't content with raping their viewers, they want news orgs to give them money too. News orgs want their share, so they paywalled everything.

    Between not paying for referrals and not showing articles to anyone who hasn't paid... no shit news isn't getting views any longer. And ads? If you don't host your own, a lot of people block them. And if you don't, eventually the inevitably third-party ad platform serves up some malicious code.

    • Between not paying for referrals and not showing articles to anyone who hasn't paid... no shit news isn't getting views any longer. And ads? If you don't host your own, a lot of people block them. And if you don't, eventually the inevitably third-party ad platform serves up some malicious code.

      There so much TRUTH in that statement.

      No webmaster wants the hassle of hosting their own ads. The added work and potential liability just isn't worth it.

      And those paywalls and "window shaded" or "blurred out" websites are an absolute annoyance.

      Maybe I would subscribe to a website IF I could evaluate their content (to decide if it's truly worth the money - heck, you can test-drive most cars, right?), and not just some carefully curated pieces that the website WANTS me to see.

      • Minor addition/change: "I should be able to anonymously evaluate (test drive) the content of a web site"

        Too many websites want you to share some amount of personal information before you can peek behind the "window shades", unblur the pictures, or walk behind the paywall.

        Requiring personal info just so you can anonymously evalute website content seems tantamount to "tracking", and I say "NO" to any form of "web tracking".

  • by jonsmirl ( 114798 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @12:05PM (#63942155) Homepage

    "Google says it sends 24 billion clicks per month, or 9,000 per second, to news publishers’ websites through its search engine and associated news page."

    How many of those are to paywalls which are immediately abandoned? I know the majority of mine are. I've just stopped clicking and use places like CNN where you can actually see the stories.

  • by SubmergedInTech ( 7710960 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @12:15PM (#63942171)

    "What Happens When News Sites Demand Major Online Platforms Pay For Linking To Them?"

  • by wdr1 ( 31310 ) * <wdr1@nOsPAm.pobox.com> on Saturday October 21, 2023 @12:15PM (#63942173) Homepage Journal

    The Publishers misplayed their hand. They wanted Big Tech to start to pay them just for indexing & showing links to their content.

    If Big Tech Wants News, Shouldn’t They Pay for It?
    https://www.yesmagazine.org/de... [yesmagazine.org]

    California Bill Would Make Big Tech Pay Publishers for News
    https://www.govtech.com/policy... [govtech.com]

    Google agrees to pay French publishers for news
    https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21... [cnn.com]

    Canada Introduces Bill Requiring Online Giants to Share Revenues With Publishers
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/0... [nytimes.com]

    So, of course, the obvious answer is stop linking to those sites.

    The publishers aren't stupid, so I imagine they knew the value they were getting from all the traffic being driven to their site. I imagine they thought they could have their cake & eat too -- both the traffic & the fees.

  • There is a piece of startup advice that goes: Customers don't appreciate free services. The customers on the cheapest plans tend to send more support requests and are overall more demanding, so don't be afraid to fire them.

    In this case, a bunch of customers on a free plan sent out too many entitled demands and the service providers rightly decided to fire them.

  • More and more news in my personal filters disregard my language settings and 1 third of the articles are written in alphabets I don't even recognize.

  • by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @01:22PM (#63942281) Homepage Journal

    News companies won the ability to make referers pay, but in doing so it demonstrated how they misunderstood the internet and how these social media sites were actually helping. Unless they can undo the laws they thought were meant to help them, then maybe it’s time they rethink how they find readers?

    I know myself I simply return to news sites I know. For smaller news sites I probably would have only found them via social media or word of mouth.

    • Unless they can undo the laws they thought were meant to help them....

      It's too late. The damage is done, and the online platforms are not going to put themselves back into the same vulnerable position they were in before.

      Even if LLM's are used to invent the news, the large platforms will be content to use them to continue drawing clicks. And quite frankly, not much will change.

    • I think they understood quite well, noting what other commenters have said: if the links just lead to a paywalled article, then the news site isn't showing its ads and is not making money, even if they got the click-through. So, they insisted on being paid for the link, even if it does not enable anyone to actually read the article.

  • In the last 1-2 months, Youtube has changed things under the hood, squashing independent creators in favor of corporate captured content. I've seen over a 400% decrease in my views in this same time period.

  • The sue if they do it too much, so I guess they'll do it too if they don't do it enough.

  • by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @03:49PM (#63942465)
    Paywalls not only do not drive the hoped-for subscriptions, they also train us to not click on their links. Its like they think we are dumber than birds and are not going to learn which click does not give a reward. Then there is the advertisers desire to know all about us so they can show the perfect ad instead of just showing an ad based on the requested content. I really hate it when they complain about my non-existent "ad blocker" while showing an ad.

    The new "news executives" have been marketing themselves as being able to provide more specific and more valuable ads -- and then have failed to produce the expected results. Advertising conversions were once more than infinitesimal, but when a person is being bombarded by multiple ads for the 72,000+ seconds a week they are online, then infinitesimal conversion is the inevitable result. People aren't buying that much more, but they are seeing orders of magnitude more ads than we did via TV in the 70's. Gathering all that information is not going to make anyone's results noticeably better when the measurable results are in the noise. But a huge part of what pays for everything on the internet is based in this false premise that it is possible to sufficiently target a person with enough information about them that measurable conversions will be non-infinitesimal. It seems online news organizations bought into this falsity and are continuing to double down on it.

    They have harmed themselves more than they have been harmed.
    • Another reason is that we don't need what they would like to advertise and sell. I almost never see a relevant ad. I know what I want, and when I want it I can go get it without ads. For new information I go to dedicated forums, I won't pick a product from an ad. Because ads never served my interests.
  • I feel it should be recognize that the news has been and is currently censored on social media in some countries. Initially it was Australia until they came to a partial deal to unaffect some of it while it's censored for Canadians due to the Liberal government overplaying their hand. Further to that, Facebook as a whole is blocked in countries like Myanmar and Russia.
  • by sonoronos ( 610381 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @07:11PM (#63942723)

    Fewer web sites posting garbage posted by radicalists and provacateurs calling themselves journalists can only be a good thing.

  • This seems to imply its some sort of collusive behavior when the explanation is vastly simpler: all these news organizations thought their news was supporting social media, so they have spent the last decade lobbying government to compel $$$ from the socials.
    Turns out, this is more symbiosis than parasitism: the socials were driving traffic to the news guys too.
    Looks like someone's greed killed the golden goose..
    Dumb, greedy fuckers.

  • by dohzer ( 867770 ) on Saturday October 21, 2023 @11:58PM (#63942997)

    Twitter, now known as X

    Sorry, but it's still Twitter. Always has been, always will be.

  • by shess ( 31691 ) on Sunday October 22, 2023 @01:38AM (#63943079) Homepage

    The aggregators pulled together all the various stories in one place. Then a bunch of spam sites popped up to repackage news in an envelope of ads, and listed on the aggregators to drive traffic. An arms race ensued, and now even the major outlets all look like ad streams with news interstitials. I don't know what the solution is, but I no longer consider the aggregators to be adding much (if any) value. Likewise for the social platforms, its all news-like content in a spam envelope.

    What we probably NEED is to cut back to thoughtful periodic publishing. We won't do that because we're so busy analyzing the fractional pennies per impression that we can't think of the future.

  • In the next couple of years more and more news are going to be reworded with AI, maybe it would even do basic consistency checks between multiple outlets, providing a superior article. The LLMs will be fast and tireless, let's see if Google simply chooses to index LLM written news and just not care about big outlets anymore.

Marvelous! The super-user's going to boot me! What a finely tuned response to the situation!

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