(San Francisco) Facebook Chief Information Officer Campbell Brown announced her resignation on October 3. The next day, X began removing the titles of articles relayed on its platform. On October 11, the head of the Threads application from Instagram, a competitor to X, indicated that his social network was not going to “amplify” information from traditional media.
Even Google – the media’s strongest partner in a decade – has become less reliable, causing media concerns about their dependence on the web giant. Google laid off news employees during its two recent restructurings, and some media outlets are seeing a drop in traffic from Google.
If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: the big online platforms are dumping information.
Some tech bosses, like Instagram’s Adam Mosseri, say outright that it’s not worth hosting the news because of the divisive debates it provokes. Elon Musk, owner of X, does not hide his disdain for the traditional press. The media seems resigned to the fact that traffic from online platforms will dry up for good.
Relations between the media and these platforms have always been bad, but the latest conflict is striking and the consequences for the information sector are serious.
Many news organizations almost failed when the internet turned their business model upside down more than a decade ago. Survival online depended on reader clicks – and, by extension, advertising – brought to their sites by search engines, Facebook and Twitter.
Today, this source is drying up. As of September 2020, major U.S. news sites derived 11.5% of their traffic from social media. By last September, that figure had fallen to 6.5%, reports Similarweb, an analytics company.
“This already struggling business model is really disrupted,” says Adrienne LaFrance, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine. Traffic from social media has always had its ups and downs, but the 2022-2023 drop is worse than most media outlets predicted, she says.
A spokesperson for Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, declined to comment. Neither Elon Musk nor Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, responded to requests from the New York Times.
Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s vice president of media partnerships, said in a statement that the company continues to “direct high-value traffic to media and support a healthy and open web.”
Times have changed. During the rise of the consumer Internet, around twenty years ago, Google, Facebook and Twitter bet big on journalism and broadcast articles from traditional media.
“Each internet platform has a responsibility to try to help finance […] information” and to build partnerships, said Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, several years ago, when he was still courting the media .
Both Facebook and Twitter have launched a few initiatives meant to promote news. So, in 2019, Facebook created Facebook News, a tab guiding readers to articles from paid media partners. Twitter also tried partnerships with the Associated Press and Reuters in 2021 to combat misinformation.
It didn’t last. Facebook News no longer exists and Ms. Brown, who was responsible for it, has announced her departure. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter a year ago, the platform has disfavored traditional media, including no longer displaying headlines in posts and removing the blue “verified” checkmark for journalists and public figures who do not. didn’t pay to get it. TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram bring negligible traffic to media.
The sharp decline in traffic brought by social media over the past two years affects all media, including the New York Times.
“We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants for much of our circulation,” editor-in-chief Emma Tucker told reporters during the meeting.
No longer able to rely on Meta and X, the media fell back on Google. For more than 20 years, media outlets large and small have been pitching their content to stand out in Google search results, a practice called “search engine optimization.” This treatment includes supertitles and subtitles anticipating searches by Google users, adding links to other sites in articles and maintaining teams responsible for generating traffic and being on the lookout for the evolution of search engines.
Google says it directs 24 billion clicks per month – 9,000 per second – to media websites through its search engine and Google News page.
At the Los Angeles Times, the proportion of clicks coming from online searches has increased (from 50% to 60%, previously 30% to 40%), but doesn’t make up for losses from social media, according to the deputy managing editor of readership, Samantha Melbourneweaver.
But even Google is causing concern. Some media outlets have noticed a drop in traffic referenced by Google in recent weeks, say two executives from two different major media sites. Google remains by far the main source of traffic, they say, but the observed decline does not bode well.
“It’s volatile,” Ms. Melbourneweaver said. Google exists to satisfy Google’s needs, not ours. »
Privately, media outlets are trying to plan for the post-Google future and anticipate what will happen if Google’s artificial intelligence products gain popularity and further bury links to media articles.
Ms. LaFrance says The Atlantic promotes its own newsletters, home page and print magazine. At the end of June, the news magazine claimed more than 925,000 paying subscribers for its print and digital products, up 10% year-over-year.
“Direct connections to the readership are important, obviously,” LaFrance says. As human beings and readers, we should not settle for three all-powerful, attention-consuming megaplatforms to arouse our curiosity and inform us. »
“In some ways, this decline of the social web is extraordinarily liberating,” she adds.
