6 ms·
Can anybody explain to me what the problem is with Facebook et el driving traffic to news sites? Most of the times I visit newspapers websites I was sent there
by worik 6y ago
Can anybody explain to me what the problem is with Facebook et el driving traffic to news sites?
Most of the times I visit newspapers websites I was sent there from social media.
- vinger 6y agoA group of people want to control what websites your friends are sharing.
- pochamago 6y agoThe cynical streak in me would suggest that now is a popular time to criticize major tech organs for their relationship to news, and the Australian government is hoping to use that to funnel money from US companies to Australian ones.
- t0mas88 6y agoYou could argue that taxes were designed before the "you are the product" age. If Apple sells a phone in Australia to a local customer, they pay Australian sales tax and possibly import dues to get the phone into the country. When Facebook sells data from an Australian user to a random advertiser, all tax is due in Ireland/Netherlands or some other tax haven and Australia makes nothing. So while this approach with news media is a strange one, I think there is an argument to be made for taxing things differently. Make Facebook/Google pay a fair tax in all countries they're active in. Then each country can decide how they want to use that, if a democratically elected government in Australia wants to subsidize news using taxes they should be able to do so.
- pochamago 6y agoWhile you're right that there's a reasonable argument, I can't say it's one I agree with. I already strongly dislike the change in US tax law that now requires all e-commerce companies to adjust their sales tax based on the location of the consumer. It added a bunch of new bureaucratic overhead for us on top of negating one of the competitive fringe benefits of having a business in a small state instead of California. And it mostly just seems arbitrary to me which way that tax swings, rather than intrinsically fair.
- t0mas88 6y agoTrue, the US sales tax thing is a great case-study on how it doesn't work. Taxing revenue probably also doesn't work due to large differences in margin. If you tax 1% on the revenue of a 1.5% margin kind of business it sounds rather unfair, charging a 1% revenue tax on a business with 90% margin sounds low. So indeed there is no clear simple implementation strategy for this yet.
- worik 6y agoTax revenue, not profits, is a potential solution
- offby37years 6y agoIf anything, US big tech is and has been siphoning money from the Australia news media for a decade.
- AdrianB1 6y agoHow exactly is that? Giving you a link to the news media web site does extract money from them?
- offby37years 6y agoLink previews (headline, image, blurb) are a substitute good. Many would-be eyeballs never click through. Big tech profits, news media dwindles.
- extropy 6y agoAustralia thinks they can extract value from news aggregators. There is the argument that showing news snippets next to the link is what you bare paying for. But otherwise it's a pure media money grab backed by the government.
- offby37years 6y agoThe complaint is that many users just read the headline and never click to leave the Facebook walled garden, generating 0 income or traffic for the news media. They complain that big tech gets the reward (content that drives user engagement) and further, it detracts from the potential traffic they would otherwise receive.
- worik 6y agoThanks. Have you reference for that? That is the first coherent argument, IMO, for their position. Coherent, but so wrong I think.
- angry_octet 6y agoThose ads you see in FB and next to google results generate money for them, not for the websites whose content you're looking at. Basically the portal collects money from helping the advertiser match closely to people who will buy, but the content platforms don't have that info on the user and can't influence their decision making process as much.
- MarkMc 6y agoAccording to the Australian government, the problem is that it benefits Facebook too much and doesn't benefit the news websites enough. An analogy might be to minimum wage laws: a laissez-faire market would result in an unfair distribution of benefits, so the government steps in.