The CBC is apparently seeing the rotten fruits of their link tax labour as their web traffic faces decline.
When Meta warned in 2022 that it would be dropping news links, major Canadian media lobbyists responded by calling the move a “bluff”. They based their response on the disproven theory that Meta depends entirely on news links to retain their online success. That was obviously not true because multiple studies have shown that news is not even close to being a primary driver for users to use platforms like Facebook.
Faced with all the evidence in the world that pointed to what a horrible mistake this campaign to bring link taxes into Canada was, the lobbyists doubled down on their belligerence and accused anyone of deviating from their core talking points as little more than “Big Tech shills”. The push for link taxes was never about evidence based policy making, but rather, a cult like push that rejects the reality of a modern internet in favour of an ideological reimagining of how the real world works. As further evidence of that, supporters pushed the thinking that everyone just needs to believe hard enough before everything will just magically work out for them in the end. In other words, link tax supporters were complete morons.
As we have often characterized the push for link taxes, observers and critics who actually understood how the real world works, we were all just watching (at times, helplessly) as the lobbyists drove the media sector towards a cliff. All the belief in the world wasn’t going to spare the media companies from the harsh reality of the rocks below.
The media companies then careened past the edge of the cliff and gravity began taking over when Meta blocked news links. For those driving this car, the moment was marked with some conflict. Some argued that this was just an illusion while others started realizing that maybe the cliff was real after all. Regardless, as far as Meta was concerned, the media companies blew past the point of no return with the peddle firmly planted into the floor.
Google, for their part, was seemingly heading into the same direction. After all, they had said repeatedly that they would drop news links when the laws come into force. The Canadian government, somewhere along the line, realized that they were about to be known as the government that killed the Canadian media (at the media’s behest to add insult to injury). In a last ditch effort, the Canadian government panicked and folded to Google, knowing that without a deal, the entire media sector would be in dire straights. essentially, the government hastily installed airbags to lesson the impact on the rocks below.
While many supporters waved the $100 million fund model (a chunk of that not even being new money given that existing deals were to be folded into that total in the first place) as some sort of victory, there was nothing victorious about it. The only thing the media got was the fact that they weren’t going to get completely delisted from Google search products (which was not just Google News, but Google Search and other features as well). Anyone with any reasonable knowledge on SEO knows that getting delisted for a vast majority of websites is basically a death sentence.
What’s more, even the most optimistic view of $100 million isn’t even close for making up the $230 million in value that was lost with Meta’s pullout. What’s more, the link tax concept that was so heavily pushed for completely died the day the fund model was made official. In short, the media was operating at a loss thanks to the very law they pushed. This with the added humiliation of how they were long warned that this would happen in the first place.
Even as the rocks got closer, though, some insisted that Meta was totally hurting from their decision and they just need to hold out a little longer before Meta finally folds. There was no evidence to what they were saying, but plenty of evidence to show that they were wrong on that. After roughly six months, the value of Meta was soaring. Facebook’s traffic remained unchanged, users barely noticed a difference, and the medias Facebook traffic collapsed.
Simply put, we are well past the theory stage and now at the practical and critics have been right all along. Publishers need platforms far more than platforms need publishers and Canada was ground zero for proving that concept to the letter.
Now, we are learning that some data is trickling out into the public to confirm these results yet again. Reports on the traffic towards the CBC have taken a huge hit since Meta pulled out of news links altogether. Michael Geist was able to get a screenshot of this data:
The CBC’s support for Bill C-18 was always indefensible. Rather than leaning into its mandate by emphasizing universal, free access to credible news, it wanted to be treated like any other news outlet. Net result = underperforming results and a small Google handout. Disastrous. pic.twitter.com/0pxqTVW2fk
— Michael Geist (@mgeist) March 6, 2024
The CBC’s support for Bill C-18 was always indefensible. Rather than leaning into its mandate by emphasizing universal, free access to credible news, it wanted to be treated like any other news outlet. Net result = underperforming results and a small Google handout. Disastrous.
Here’s the screenshot:
In short, the CBC is getting hit by a lack of traffic from Meta. It’s a pretty obvious outcome. When you kick yourself out of the largest social media platform on the planet, your reach is going to suffer. That is pretty much plain as day. Yet, for some, we’re just being a “Big Tech shill” for… pointing out this obvious fact. With no real fallback plan that has even the slightest hope of recovering from this blunder, the results are obvious. Some claim that CBC traffic has actually plummeted by as much as 23%, but we can’t confirm that.
Still, it’s very easy to point out that the CBC isn’t the only one taking a traffic hit. We’ve already seen multiple newspapers shut down as the Online News Act proved to be the final nail in the coffins in those businesses. Others have also admitted that their traffic have taken a hit since the Meta pullout.
So, we are already seeing some experiencing the impact of the rocks below. Thanks to Meta saying they aren’t renewing the deals they made in other countries and, instead, opted to just drop news links altogether in several countries, it’s extremely unlikely that Meta is going to change course here. After all, they have no financial incentive to do so to begin with.
Some have vaguely pointed to the Competition Act and said that dropping news links is anti-competitive, but the argument never made any sense at all. This is actually an argument that says that withdrawing from the market is anti-competitive. That is literally the exact opposite of being anti-competitive. If Meta was creating major news rooms and flooding their platforms with their own news articles while downgrading every other news source out there, then yes, that would be cause for concern on the competition side of things. The problem is that Meta is pulling out of the sector completely which is the exact opposite of being anti-competitive.
The truth in the matter is that there isn’t any legal mechanism that would change the situation apart from rescinding the Online News Act. That is the only thing that could possibly restore sanity to the situation, but the publishers have no intention of calling for this.
So, we are now stuck with the situation of the Online News Act continuing to inflict immeasurable harm on the news sector in Canada. The large media companies have made their bed and now they find themselves having to lie in it. In the CBC’s case, the traffic woes were entirely self-inflicted here.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
