When veteran journalist Campbell Brown stepped down as owner of Facebook Meta last week, it marked the end of the social media giant. flirting with the news.
Ms. Brown, a former NBC and CNN anchor, was hired to great fanfare in 2017, promising to repair media relations and oversee a revolution in the sector after a spate of fake news that undermined the election of Donald Trump.
Six years later, her quiet departure underlines that for boss Mark Zuckerberg, news is no longer top of the agenda.
For advertising-funded publishers, especially those in the tabloid end of the market, Meta's shift in priorities comes as a painful blow. Having built their business on the wave of clicks on social networks, digital mass media outlets have faced a sharp decline in traffic.
The effect was clear in the figures released by Reach on Tuesday. The publisher of the Mirror and Express newspapers has blamed changes to Facebook's algorithm as its revenue continues to fall.
Reach reported a 14% fall in digital revenue in the third quarter. Reach said its page views fell by more than a fifth in the first nine months of the year, mainly due to changes at Facebook.
The algorithm changes are compounded by a broader downturn in the ad market, which is growing rapidly. inflation is forcing brands to cut costs.
Reach, which also owns a host of local titles including the Manchester Evening News, has outlined plans to cut more than 600 jobs this year as it battles to cut costs.
< p>While Ms. Brown's departure from Meta symbolizes quicksand at Meta, the company has been turning its back on the news for some time.
Last year, Facebook split its News Feed into separate Home and Feeds tabs, giving less visibility to publishers' posts. In September, the company said it was ending its partnership with news content across Europe and closing the Facebook News tab entirely.
The impact of these changes has been profound. Data from Likeweb shows that clicks to leading news sites from Facebook have fallen from 60 million in July last year to just 21 million in the same month this year.
In a letter to Sir Nick Clegg, Meta's global president and former deputy prime minister, the News Media Association (NMA) last month accused the social media giant of «stifling trusted news» with its changes.
Campbell Brown's departure from Meta last week marked the end of the social media giant's brief flirtation with news
Meanwhile, Twitter, now renamed X, has also deprioritized news. Last week, owner Elon Musk removed headlines from news stories in an effort to «improve aesthetics» and keep users on the site. Referrals from X fell from 45 million to 23 million in a year.
US publishers CNN and the New York Post are among those feeling the impact of these industry changes. In the UK, MailOnline, which also uses social media to attract 24.7 million monthly visitors, is grappling with the same crisis as it merges operations with sister title the Daily Mail.
Digital publishers are being forced to rethink their reliance on social media as a result. Fickle algorithm changes have already sounded the death knell for start-ups like BuzzFeed News and Vice.
A MailOnline source insists that most readers come directly to the site, with social media traffic «the icing on the cake «.
However, the main source of traffic is in sharp decline — and, more broadly, the advertising decline is exacerbating the problem: digital tabloids must find new ways to reach their readers.
One of the main areas of activity is the United States. Reach launched Express in the US and plans to follow suit with Mirror. It now employs more than 30 journalists in its New York office.
The Mail has also advertised for numerous US jobs in recent months, in what one industry player has described as an «Atlantic drift».
For UK publishers, the reason is clear: there is an accessible market in the US. According to Reach, the figure is 263 million, which is five times more than in the UK. Advertising spending is almost eight times higher at $300 billion. The Telegraph is also expanding its operations in the US.
However, while other news outlets, including the Times and Telegraph, have moved to subscription models, tabloid models focus on producing large volumes of stories as quickly as possible. are now facing difficulties.
Mail+ , the premium subscription version of Mail's online products, attracts 87,000 active users — part of MailOnline's daily visitors.
Instead of subscriptions, Reach focuses on convincing readers to sign up via email. This allows the company to obtain more data from its customers and generate more revenue directly from advertising and e-commerce.
Other areas of experimentation include Reach's efforts to increase page views via WhatsApp and the launch of the Curiously brand, which aims to attract younger audiences through short videos on TikTok and Instagram.
In Mail — The Telegraph. Earlier this year it was revealed that the publisher had approached Helen Warner, the former head of broadcasting at ITV and Channel 4, to relaunch its TV promotion.
As well as expanding into new markets, the industry is looking to rewrite the rules of the road through social networks.
Many are calling for a licensing deal in which tech giants would pay to use news outlets' content. . This approach has already been implemented in Australia and is a key part of the government's upcoming digital markets bill.
But this solution is far from a panacea. Silicon Valley giants are lobbying hard for Rishi Sunak to ease up on reforms. In Canada, Meta has begun blocking news articles in response to a law that forces them to pay for content.
The pressure is increasing with artificial intelligence, which the news industry fears puts copyrights at risk and could lead to tech giants diverting even more more visitors from their websites.
More optimistic observers argue that there will always be a demand for news, which will eventually outweigh any changes in the way readers access it.
But After years of dependence on Silicon Valley, publishers are realizing that in the new Internet age, they may be better off going it alone.
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