With the dropping of news links, it appears that engagement with those Facebook/Instagram pages has fallen off of a cliff.
With Facebook predictably dropping news links in Canada, other predictions, well, predictably, started falling into place. News websites saw their traffic take large hits while Facebooks user engagement remained unchanged. As critics of the Online News Act (formerly Bill C-18) such as myself have said all along, publishers need platforms far more than platforms need publishers.
If you needed any further evidence this is a thing, data published by Le Devoire shows that user engagement of the large media companies Facebook pages are in a state of collapse. Steve Faguy noted the developments in English:
To the surprise of no one, Facebook pages of Canadian media outlets have seen their engagement plummet over the past month. https://t.co/cbncAZaFrR
— Steve Faguy (@fagstein) September 7, 2023
To the surprise of no one, Facebook pages of Canadian media outlets have seen their engagement plummet over the past month.
The linked article to Le Devoir is in French, though some rough translations suggest that media pages on Facebook and Instagram drop by about 56% between the months of July and August. The data came from the use of the Crowd Tangle tool, analyzing 73 Facebook and 61 Instagram pages.
Of course, different media companies had different strategies when it comes to promotion on social media. If we assume a website generates 15% of a media companies traffic is from Facebook, having that engagement chopped in half (which is a best case scenario), then you are looking at a 7.5% drop in traffic overall. If it’s more like 40%, then that’s a 20% drop in traffic. Obviously, the less dependency a company has on Facebook and Instagram, the more unscathed they are. If, however, they depended a lot on Meta platforms, the more of a hit you take. A 20% drop in traffic is obviously not something that will go unnoticed by any means.
Some out there might look at those statistics and say that the media companies can easily absorb that hit without too much problem. The problem with that is that this isn’t even the end of the story. With Google announcing that it would soon drop news links altogether as well, that’s where you will see media companies take even larger hits to their website’s overall traffic. Generally speaking, websites depend much more on Google than they do on Facebook. The loss of Facebook is a tough loss, but the loss of Google traffic can easily deal a fatal blow to a lot of websites out there.
Either way, even if the media companies don’t want to admit it, we know that they are feeling the pinch from the lack of Meta traffic. It is perhaps a big reason why the media and the government both politicize the wildfires across the country in a vain effort to try and shame the platforms into complying with the ridiculous link tax law in ways that they wanted, rather than what makes the best business sense for the platforms. With fortunes drying up faster for the large media companies, desperation set in and even the most basic levels of human decency went straight out the window.
It’s hard to have sympathy for the large media companies in this debate. After all, they were the ones that invented and sold the pure fantasy of the platforms “stealing” their content (Big Lie 1.0). This in an effort to push the ridiculous link tax in the first place. All the warnings were ignored thanks, in part, to the same companies insisting that warnings of blocked news links were just a “bluff” and urging the government to stand up to “bully tactics” from the platforms. Now, here we are, watching the media companies continue to find out.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
