Campbell Brown, Facebook’s top news executive, left the company this month. Twitter, now known as X, removed the headlines from the platform days later. The person in charge of Instagram’s Threads application, a competitor of X, reiterated that his social network would not amplify the news.
Even Google – news organizations’ strongest partner over the past 10 years – has become less trustworthy, making publishers more cautious about their dependence on the search giant. The company laid off news employees in two recent team shakeups, and some editors say Google’s traffic has declined.
If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: the main online platforms are breaking new ground.
Some executives at the biggest tech companies, like Adam Mosseri at Instagram, have said in no uncertain terms that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it’s worth because it leads to polarized debates. Others, like Elon Musk, the owner of X, have expressed disdain for the mainstream press. Publishers seem resigned to the idea that Big tech traffic will never be what it was before.
Even in the long-standing relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out, and the consequences for the news industry are stark.
Many news companies have struggled to survive after technology companies revolutionized the industry’s business model more than a decade ago. A lifesaver was the traffic (and, by extension, advertising) that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Now that traffic is disappearing. Major news sites got about 11.5 percent of their U.S. web traffic from social media in September 2020, according to Similarweb, a data and analytics company. In September this year, it had dropped to 6.5 percent.
“The disruption of an already difficult business model is real,” Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, said in an interview. LaFrance noted that while social traffic had always gone through periods of boom and bust, the decline over the past 12 to 18 months had been more severe than most publishers expected.
“This is a post-social website,” he added.
A spokeswoman for Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, declined to comment. Elon Musk and a spokesperson for Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, did not respond to a request for comment.
Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s vice president of global news partnerships, said in a statement that the company continued to prioritize “sending valuable traffic to publishers and supporting a healthy, open web.”
It didn’t start like that. During the rise of the consumer Internet about 20 years ago, companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter embraced journalism, and articles from traditional media companies appeared on their platforms.
“Every Internet platform has a responsibility to try to help fund and form partnerships to support news,” Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, said in a interview with the News Corp CEO several years ago, when Zuckerberg was still trying to court publishers.
Both Facebook and Twitter toyed with initiatives to support news on their platforms. In 2019, for example, Facebook inserted Facebook News, a tab for readers to find news coverage from partner publications that you pay for. Twitter also experimented with partnerships, making team will join The Associated Press and Reuters in 2021 to tackle misinformation.
But these efforts were short-lived. Facebook News no longer exists, and Ms. Brown, the executive who led the news efforts, announced her departure. Since Musk bought Twitter almost a year ago, he has made changes that downplayed traditional media on the site, including not showing headlines on articles in publications and removing the blue “verified” check mark from journalists and public figures who don’t. they did it. pay for it. Platforms like TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram generate negligible traffic numbers to media outlets.
The sharp decline in referral traffic from social media platforms over the past two years has affected all news publishers, including The New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal noted a decline that began about 18 months ago, according to a recording of a September staff meeting obtained by The New York Times. “We are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants in much of our distribution,” Emma Tucker, the Journal’s editor-in-chief, said in the newsroom at the meeting.
Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semafor and former media columnist for The Times, said web traffic was no longer “the god-given metric in digital media”. He said intermediary platforms such as SmartNews, Apple News and Flipboard were becoming more important to publishers as readers sought a mix of authoritative journalism and the option of multiple sources.
“People like to have lots of sources of information, but they don’t want to snoop around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland to find them,” Smith said.
As Meta and X are no longer trusted, publishers have become more dependent on Google. For more than two decades, publishers large and small have packaged their content to rank high in Google search results, a practice called search engine optimization. These deeply integrated efforts include creating secondary headlines intended to mimic potential queries from Google users, filling articles with links to other sites, and maintaining teams of people to generate traffic and stay on top of changes in search engines.
Google says it sends 24 billion clicks per monthor 9,000 per second, to news publishers’ websites through their search engine and associated news page.
While the Los Angeles Times is getting a slightly larger share of traffic from online searches (50 to 60 percent, up from 30 to 40 percent), it’s not making up for losses from social media, said Samantha Melbourneweaver, deputy editor. . for the audience.
But even Google is faltering. Some publishers have seen drops in Google referral traffic in recent weeks, two people at different major media sites said. Although Google remains by far the largest source of referral traffic for publishers, those people worry that the decline is a sign of things to come.
“It’s volatile,” Melbourneweaver said. “Google exists for Google’s needs, not ours.”
Google laid off some members of its news team in September, and this week laid off up to 45 workers from its Google News team, the Alphabet Workers Union said. (The Information, a technology news website, previously reported on the Google News layoffs.)
“We’ve made some internal changes to streamline our organization,” Google spokesperson Jenn Crider said in a statement.
The news partnership team was created to forge agreements with publishers and associations and over time introduced programs to train newsrooms, support the development of news products and respond to governments around the world that have lobbied Google to share more revenue with news organizations.
Zaidi wrote in an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times that the team would adopt more artificial intelligence. “We had to make some difficult decisions to best position our team for what lies ahead,” he wrote.
Google has been pushing ai all year, launching an ai chatbot called Bard in March and offering some users in May a version of its search engine that can generate explanations, poetry and prose on top of traditional web results. News organizations have expressed concern that these artificial intelligence systems, which can answer users’ questions without them clicking a link, could one day erode traffic to their sites.
Privately, several publishers have discussed what the future of post-Google traffic will look like and how to best prepare if Google’s ai products become more popular and further bury links to news posts.
LaFrance said The Atlantic was pushing branded newsletters, its homepage and its print magazine. At the end of June, The Atlantic had more than 925,000 paid subscribers across its print and digital products, a 10 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said.
“Direct connections with your readers are obviously important,” LaFrance said. “We, as human beings and readers, should not only resort to three all-powerful, attention-grabbing mega-platforms to pique our curiosity and feel informed.”
He added: “In some ways, this decline of the social network is extraordinarily liberating.”
