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Facebook’s ban on sharing Australian news stories hurting publisher traffic
- draw_down 6y agoDang, turns out actions have consequences :(
- lanevorockz 6y agoMy surprise is that people complain a lot about colonialism while pushing for California to colonise the whole world.
- xxpor 6y agoInstead Australia's colonized the world (News Corp).
- Karishma1234 6y agoSorry but this comparison does not hold. Australia or anyone else is more than welcome to ban Facebook and other companies but because of very nature of internet would needlessly waste resources. Few things to note: 1. Just because Facebook is from California and LocalBook Inc. is local does not mean LocalBook would be any better. For sheer scale, the Localbook is more likely to be corrupt. 2. Australia's regulation is hare brained. Sorry, but such moves are expected from third world despotic dictators and not a country that calls itself developed. 3. Shouldn't we all cheer the fact that at least for Australia Facebook will not be handling "news' thus wont be influencing people ?
- ben_w 6y ago> Shouldn't we all cheer the fact that at least for Australia Facebook will not be handling "news' thus wont be influencing people That conclusion does not follow from the premise. There are many ways to influence without being “the news”, and the news is at least wearing the clothes of shining a light on the hidden places of political and economic malfeasance (the fact that the term “yellow journalism” is older than any living person notwithstanding).
- aplummer 6y agoI don’t really understand this comment in this context. I’m hardly a free marketeer but if zuck wanted to put nothing but his giant smiling face on the news feed 3 times a week, it’s his website after all.
- beckman466 6y ago> while pushing for California to colonise the whole world. Example?
- RIMR 6y agoFacebook is a website on the Internet, and Australians are not forced to visit it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaway3699 6y agoWait, who is complaining about colonialism anymore?
- actuator 6y agoI think FB was absolutely right to do it. Asking for payment for links embedded in hypertext goes against the ethos of www. It sets up a dangerous precedent for the web in general. If they really had to find a nice middleground with FB profiting from news consumption from within; they could have not put `og` tags on the page or asked FB to block metadata extraction. But asking for payment for links in search results or shared posts is just bad regulation.
- aplummer 6y agoI also agree with you, though I wonder about the copyright to the headline and blurb content when other people share. IMO I agree any website should be able to opt out (or in) of Facebook if they like (i seriously doubt they would), and then everyone can run their own website.
- actuator 6y ago> I wonder about the copyright to the headline and blurb content when other people share. I think this is a slippery slope on copyright enforcement, we have seen it getting ridiculous on YouTube. What if someone shares a screenshot of the article? and if we do this, are we not allowed to write dialogue exchange from movies in social media posts as well?
- aplummer 6y agoI think you raise the kind of grey area legislation would be good to look at (fair use), not what we are looking at now. I guess from my brief thinking is once your bot visits the site to scrape it (and uses resources from the vendor) it’s a bit different to a screenshot.
- michaelmrose 6y agoThere is a trivial way to avoid being scraped by a search engine robots.txt For facebook most of the time when it creates a screenshot to show next to the title in a share results in 1 or possibly many views driving revenue for the linked site for a small increase in bandwidth. For example their site gets pulled once and read a dozen times.
- jeffbee 6y agoWell, well, well: if it isn't the consequences of my own actions!
- dazc 6y agoWouldn't this be an obvious result since they suddenly pulled the rug less than 2 days ago? I'd be interested to see how this would play out over a timescale when folks get used to going direct to news sites for their news? //*using the term news lightly, of course
- bpodgursky 6y agoOr as it gets worse (I consider equally likely), as the news sites lose mindshare (as they stop showing up on social media) and people stop visiting them at all.
- visarga 6y ago> the news sites lose mindshare (as they stop showing up on social media) and people stop visiting them at all That's the main problem for them. They are missing right from the place where people socialize, debate, tag and search. They are hanging from a thread, it's only when people intentionally seek their news that they will get to display them. Maybe that will show how much people care.
- ehnto 6y agoYeah you would want to wait for some time, like possibly months, before drawing conclusions.
- frob 6y agoI'm often very critical of FB, but this approach makes absolute sense. Australia is demanding payment for every shared news story so FB decides it no longer allows the sharing of news stories. This is like if politicians were shocked that raising cigarette taxes resulted in a drop in cigarette sales. FB now has an explicit monetary incentive NOT to allow news in AU and it is a direct result of government actions.
- sigstoat 6y ago> This is like if politicians were shocked that raising cigarette taxes resulted in a drop in cigarette sales. they go back and forth, at their convenience, on whether or not taxing things causes less of the thing to be produced.
- lostlogin 6y ago> whether or not taxing things causes less of the thing to be produced. It causes less to be consumed and this is part of New Zealand’s strategy to make the country (tobacco) smoke free. The numbers shown below are a little misleading as the black market increases as the tax rises, as the link notes. ‘The collective impact of the initiatives that make up New Zealand’s tobacco control programme, including tobacco excise tax, is having the desired impact on smoking rates which are trending down. Among Māori, daily smoking prevalence fell from 39.2 percent to 37.7 percent (1.5 percent) between 2006/7 and 2011/12, but during the period of annual tobacco excise increases they fell from 37.7 percent to 31.2 percent in 2017/18 (6.5 percent) –a substantial acceleration in the decrease in prevalence.’ https://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/information-release/cabinet-paper-1-january-2020-tobacco-excise-tax-increase-redacted.pdf https://www.health.govt.nz/system/files/documents/informatio...
- sigstoat 6y ago> It causes less to be consumed obviously. and yet politicians forget that when they're not talking about sin taxes.
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- srcreigh 6y agoIt's only been 2 days. People need time to adapt to other methods of sharing news. The article mentions this: > If this shutoff continues, I’d imagine that the more dedicated news consumers might adapt in ways that are, on net, positive for publishers. Maybe they go to a newspaper’s website more often, or they sign up for a daily newsletter to get their fix. It does go on though. > But the casual reader of news on Facebook — and that’s most users, given that news stories make up only about 4 percent of the typical News Feed — might just skip out on news entirely. Time will tell whether this ends up a net win for publishers. Not only in terms of traffic/revenue but quality of journalism, ie freedom to post non-clickbait articles.
- mullingitover 6y agoMy prediction is that this will just send publishers deeper into a death spiral if it continues. People won't stop sharing information, the publishers will just become even less relevant and they'll be replaced by alternatives which, even if Australia walks back this rule, will do long-term damage to the current publishers.
- justapassenger 6y agoWhen I made an active effort to reduce my Facebook news consumption I’ve narrowed down on about 2 sources I’d visit daily. It was win for the big guys, and loss for smaller publishers that I’d get exposed to occasionally via FB algorithms. And given the polarization of the press overall, I think that it also made me more polarized, just due to limited sources I utilize, that are doing same clickbaity and outrage fueling stories on their webpages, as clicks matter everywhere, not only on social media.
- dangjc 6y agoThis might be a short term hit to publishers, but maybe readers will eventually retrain to visit news sites directly rather than relying on Facebook and friends to select articles for them. This is very much a fight over who controls the entrance to the web and it's probably better it not get centralized into Google and Facebook. It didn't work out well for AOL and Yahoo.
- dexen 6y agoThe other possible scenario is even more enticing: that smaller, or entirely new, outfits raise in popularity on Facebook and bring back the much needed plurality of voices.
- michaelmrose 6y agoThere are more than enough voices on the internet most of them make as much sense as the voices some hear in their heads. Its never been easier to share your perspective online. We are only barely now trying to make it a little harder to share evil and crazy and I think we aren't near done.
- visarga 6y ago> maybe readers will eventually retrain to visit news sites directly rather than relying on Facebook and friends to select articles for them Yes, one or two sites, not the whole press. Newspapers will get to see how much people really care about their content.
- mullingitover 6y agoAustralia and publishers really set themselves up for this one. The implication of this rule is that FB is the one benefitting from the sharing of news on their site, and by giving FB an out (letting them simply ban sharing of news links) they had a chance to forego that 'benefit.' They took it, and lo and behold, FB isn't hurting but the news sites are suffering. Australia should've just taxed Facebook directly and funded the news sites with grants based on that revenue if they wanted the government to rescue publishers. This move really reveals who benefits the most from news on Facebook, and surprise, it's not Facebook.
- batch12 6y agoI made a service to get around blocks like this. I didn't account for the fact that everyone would be too scared to use it-- bannings etc.
- lizardmancan 6y agoif they write (i mean publish) something worth reading people will eventually find their way to it. a more sensible idea would be to let the publishers populate the ad slots next to their articles
- richgroot 6y agoWe haven't heard the other half of the story - what has happened to Facebook's traffic within Australia? Yes, the Australian publishers are taking a hit, but we can't guess at the outcome without knowing how much pain this might be causing Facebook.
- ehnto 6y agoI don't believe this was the right call by the government, and I think FB are well within their morale obligations to kick up a fuss. But I also hope it stays this way. News on FB is like crack for the older generations just getting their first taste of the firehose of content that is the internet. It's making so many people absolutely insufferable and worse, misinformed, and I can only imagine that it's generally hurtful to society because of this. Young people aren't immune, but they certainly have an advantage by "growing up" with the internet, and learning some survival skills along the way.
- acadien 6y agoDoes it go something like this? Content creator posts content on their site that they own and pay to operate. Mega-3rd-party shares links of this content, sometimes posting blurbs from this content, driving traffic to Mega-3rd-party site and (to a much lesser extent) boosting traffic to content creator's site. However, Mega-3rd-party site also derives revenue from this by extracting information from user behavior and user interests, enabling them to improve ad-sales. Am I misunderstanding something? Why is everyone here so pro mega-3rd-party? Another question is this similar to remixing in the music industry? Feels like royalties in a twisted kind of way.
- michaelmrose 6y agoMe bringing Tacos to a party may bring people to the party and I may parlay the social experience into a profitable new job but I'm not going to pay a portion of my income to taco bell. Taco bell's defined benefit in the situation is selling 100 tacos. The content creator's benefit is 100 clicks. People are pro facebook because allowing someone to force others to pay to link to you presupposes controlling interpersonal communications for the purpose of monetization. It would be such an ill turn that removing copyright entirely would be preferable. It's like if someone was planning on murdering Zuckerberg they would suddenly be the bad guy even if you hate him.
- rukshn 6y agoThis is an interesting situation, what if Facebook get news from public feed such as from the RSS feed? Will countries also end up asking rss readers to pay for the content they give?
- newbie578 6y agoThis is all under Facebook's right as a platform. We can use the same argument here that people use to defend Apple and the App Store. Don't like Facebook sharing news, or as of now, blocking news? Then don't use Facebook, they created their platform, they should be allowed to do however their please, after all, it is stated in ther ToS that they can do pretty much anything they want. /s If not obvious at first. I am merely pointing out the hypocrisy how people are willing to defend Apple on the same grounds they bash Facebook for.
- draw_down 6y agoNo, I unironically unsarcastically agree with your second paragraph (although I don't think they can do whatever they want, and this is not really about ToS at all). They responded to the law in basically one of two ways they could have, and people don't like what they chose. But as I and others have pointed out, actions have consequences. And publishers had to have known this was a possible outcome.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoI'm not sure what chartbeat is or how they have this data -- how would anyone know how much traffic from facebook to the publisher sites had dropped off unless they had access to either facebook outbound data or publisher referral data. Chartbeat is on the inside of publishers analytics data perhaps? Not saying I don't agree with the premise of the article, for sure this hurt the publishers initially -- but data is suspect / weak anyways... It'll take time for ppl to adjust their habits and start picking what news sites they're going to visit, if at all. or start using twitter or reddit or something to find links to news. The whole mess is so stupid
- Sherl 6y agoAU: Hey I want money for my news FB: Sorry we cant. I will pass AU: Wait, you cant do that.