Meta's just not that into you

Why Facebook's pivot away from news is probably a good thing for publishers

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Let’s jump into it…

Quick hits

The Financial Times continues to thrive in a tough media environment. "We’re at an all-time high in terms of readers and paying readers. We broke the £500 million revenue line last year for the first time." [Nieman Lab]

The New York Times wrote about several media startups that seem to have sustainable business models. What do they all have in common? They keep their burn rates low and "have attracted top journalists by putting them at the heart of the enterprise, sometimes as part owners in the companies." [NYT]

The Defector Media staff got out of Deadspin while the getting was good. It’s almost hard to mourn the loss of an outlet that basically died years ago. [CNN]

A profile of a French billionaire who's acquired multiple media outlets in his home country. [WSJ]

How James Garfield's assassination changed the field of medicine. [Momentary Experts]

This is a funny meditation on the lifespan of a creator. There's this general assumption that a creator has "made it" once they've reached a million subscribers on a particular platform, but it's entirely possible for audiences to move on if the creator isn't able to evolve and adapt according to shifting consumption habits. [Danny Gonzalez]

"In the middle of the day, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s, when business was booming, the media elite ditched their desks en masse, with the precision and predictability of the Flintstones’ opening sequence, got into their idling Lincoln Town Cars, and were driven three or four blocks to a few specific restaurants to power-lunch" [Air Mail]

Meta's just not that into you

Next month, Facebook is shutting down its dedicated news tab, but I doubt anyone reading this will actually notice. 

The tab never really made sense from a practical standpoint and was widely regarded as Facebook’s attempt to “bribe” publishers into being less critical of it. After all, publishers that appeared in the tab didn’t actually give Facebook any exclusive content, and there wasn’t much difference between what they posted to the tab vs their own dedicated pages. So why were they deserving of payouts that, in some cases, totaled in the seven figures? Bribes!

If there’s any remaining doubt that the news tab drove very little engagement for publishers, then check out this Digiday piece where they all collectively shrug at its closing:

Three publishing execs said it was hard to measure how much traffic was actually coming from the News tab compared to the main Facebook news feed. A second exec who asked to speak anonymously said that specific data wasn’t available to them but that they were aware that the majority of their traffic was coming from users’ main feed. And the first exec said measuring those referral sources was “fuzzy” due to the difficulty of tracking URLs from Facebook. 

Despite not being able to share specific data, the first publishing exec said they were under the impression that the majority of Facebook referral traffic to their site was not coming from the News tab. Their publication had seen a year-over-year Facebook referral traffic decline in the “10s of percentages,” they said.

Of course, this isn’t Meta’s only shift away from news media. Several months ago, it started blocking news links from appearing in the feeds of its Canadian users — a protest of legislation that would force the company to pay those outlets for the mere right to link to them. It also announced it would end the licensing deals with Australian news outlets that had been negotiated under threat of similar legislation. And lest you think Facebook is the only Meta-owned platform to pivot from news, the company revealed last month that both Instagram and Threads wouldn’t recommend political news through their algorithms. 

And these were just the recent developments. Facebook has actually been deprioritizing news pages for years, stretching all the way back to the aftermath of the 2016 election. Most publishers will tell you that they’ve seen steady year-over-year declines in Facebook traffic for quite some time, and many now even treat it as an afterthought in their marketing strategies.

Publishers certainly have themselves partly to blame. They’ve lobbied their local governments hard over the last years, forming a narrative that Meta extracts far more value from them than it provides in return, and therefore it owes them compensation to make up for this disparity. Even in the US, there are various bills snaking through both state and federal legislatures that aim to force Meta to the bargaining table.

Right now, we’re witnessing Meta call them on their bluff. Time and again, Mark Zuckerberg has pointed out that news articles make up a tiny percentage of the content shared on Meta-owned platforms — a portion that’s likely grown only smaller in recent years. And not only does news generate very little engagement or revenue for Meta, the presence of this content actually causes it plenty of PR headaches. How many times has Zuckerberg been told he has “blood on his hands” for the role Facebook played in helping elect Donald Trump or incite genocide in Myanmar?  

The problem for publishers now is that there aren’t great alternative platforms for aggregating and attracting audiences. Twitter has drastically shrunk in size, and Elon Musk has also deprioritized links within the feed. Platforms like YouTube and TikTok still ostensibly promote news content, but they’re not optimized for sending traffic to outside websites.

Google is still a gargantuan traffic driver — despite worries that it’s increasingly utilizing AI to siphon away clicks — but it generally only sends users who are looking for a specific piece of information. It provides a great way to drive traffic to your evergreen content, but not much else. 

The only platform that’s leaned into news is LinkedIn, but of course that only helps publishers of business news. If you cover politics or any B2C niche, you’re unlikely to generate much traction there. 

Some media executives look at the current landscape and come away dismayed by the prospect that it’s now harder than ever to drive hoards of internet users to a particular URL, but I have a more optimistic view. When I survey the current turmoil that bedevils traditional media outlets, I find that a lot of it stems from the 2010s-era ethos wherein publishers lost interest in product differentiation and instead fixated on generating traffic for traffic’s sake. This triggered a race to the bottom and fueled the rise of programmatic advertising, which commoditized eyeballs and drove down the value of every publisher’s particular audience.

In fact, I think the era of mass readership is over; instead, the most successful publishers will focus on serving small, dedicated audiences with differentiated, niche content. These audiences will be monetized through a mixture of subscriptions, advertising, events, and other products in such a way that increases the lifetime value of individual users. They’ll achieve this by focusing on down-funnel KPIs like newsletter signups, podcast downloads, and homepage visits.

In that sense, Meta’s pullback from news isn’t a blow to the industry; it’s a blessing. By weaning publishers off of cheap traffic and drive-by users, it’s forcing them to focus on how they can produce differentiated value. Audiences are still hungry for news and high quality content, and they’ll continue to reward the media brands that can satiate that hunger. Meanwhile, publishers can stop competing in a game that was always rigged for them to lose.