I can’t say I was overly surprised when I read earlier this month that Facebook’s pivot away from news, reported last year, had led to a drop in traffic to a host of publications.
As tensions between the social media network and publishers have continued to escalate, Facebook parent Meta has made no bones over its distaste at being made to pay for news shared on its platform.
I’m sure most of us can remember the debacle that was Meta’s decision to remove news from Facebook Australia in 2021, before lifting the ban a few days later. Since then we have seen reports of Meta reallocating resources from news and a Meta-commissioned report that dismissed the importance of news to Facebook’s business.
Meta policy communications director Andy Stone even warned that the tech giant would be “forced to consider removing news” from its platform if the US Congress were to pass the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. At the same time, the UK has introduced similar laws.
The growing wave of regulation over news sharing on Google and Meta has forced both companies to sit down with publishers and begin hashing out deals. For Google, the answer lay partly in developing its News Showcase program. But for Meta? Seems the more palatable option has been to slowly starve news publishers of traffic.
Data from analytics provider Chartbeat show that 1,350 global publishers saw their share of page views from external, search and social fall drop from 27% in January 2018 to 11% in April 2023.
This lines up with the experience of major UK newspaper group Reach, which has reported a fall in Facebook traffic since the start of the year, which has eaten into its revenue.
Meanwhile, 28 legacy and digital native publishers saw a sharp fall in desktop traffic between 2021 and 2023, data that web analytics provider Similarweb supplied to Press Gazette shows.
It’s tempting to take Facebook’s move as just another mile marker in its slowly deteriorating relationship with publishers throughout the years. And while there’s an element of truth to this interpretation, it does miss what’s going on in the wider regulatory landscape — namely, Facebook’s struggle against heightened oversight.
The social media giant’s years-long struggle against European regulations saw Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) issue a 1.2 billion euro ($1.3 billion) fine this week for breaches of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The regulator, which oversees the company’s operations in Europe — thanks to Meta’s decision to locate its EMEA headquarters in Dublin, took issue over Facebook’s transfer of EU user data to US servers.
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Facebook has been given five months to stop the practice, though the search giant has pledged to appeal the decision.
Ultimately, there are only so many wars with regulators a company, no matter how big it is, can fight at one time. In the grand scheme of things — and if we believe Meta’s claim that news isn’t important to its business model — walking away from news seems like the most financially sensible option currently on the table.
