August 8, 2023 was my birthday. I turned none of your darned beeswax old.
That was also the day that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram (and WhatsApp? which very few people in Canada use unless they have friends overseas, and Threads, which was supposed to be a Twitter killer, though Elon appears to be doing a decent enough job all by his lonesome) blocked links to some online news sources, including this very one you’re reading. Probably in print form.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, they did that because of Canada’s new Online News Act, which asks online companies, who appear to be making lots of money sharing online news, to return some of that money to Canadian Newspapers, who, outside of a handful of big publications and a couple more nimble, internet-first publications, appear to be making diddly squat.
This was an earnest attempt by the government to help newspapers, and not, whatever my brother may tell you, an attempt by the government to strongarm Facebook into blocking news as a very tortured and round-about way to censor the news about … I don’t know, Trudeau’s marital strife or something.
And while the end result is that you can no longer share links on Facebook, there is no censorship.
I have been playing around with the system, and it appears I can post a link to the Tumbler RidgeLines website (at www.tumblerridgelines.com). That doesn’t get blocked. At least not for now.
I am also able to post a link to an actual news story in the comments section of a Facebook post.
Finally, I can post the entire story on Facebook. This means that all the fire videos I created and shared straight to Facebook? Are safe and sound on Facebook. Again, at least for now.
I can post the stories to Facebook because I wrote the story.
If you didn’t write the story, or are webmaster for the company that paid for the rights to the story, you, my dear reader, shouldn’t be posting the story directly to Facebook.
Why not? Well, this whole debacle is about newspapers and other media companies not making any money when people read their stories, watch their videos, etc.
The way most newspapers make money online is by putting advertising on their web pages.
If you take and copy and paste the story to Facebook, they are once again not making any money off that story.
You might think the information contained in that story is important and needs to be shared. And that may be true, but if too many people do this sharing of stories, soon there won’t be any stories to share. See earlier discussion about how we are trying to help newspapers, not hurt them. The government has done something that, in attempting to help the newspapers is actually harming them.
Because Facebook? Despite an attempt a few year’s back to become ground zero for news sharing? Has discovered that not a lot of people actually share news stories on Facebook.
Actually, that’s not quite right. A lot of people share news stories on Facebook. But the news stories themselves? Don’t really generate a lot of income for Facebook.
It’s should be obvious, really. Meta made $32 billion in the last three months.
Meanwhile, last year, if you add up everything every news source in Canada made, you get $17.3 billion.
So in three months, Meta made twice the annual revenue of all Canadian News source.
And of that, 69 percent of that revenue comes from internet advertising and other sources, stop snickering.
That’s up from 24 percent a decade ago. While many papers lamented exchanging print dollars for digital pennies, a lot of newspapers have found ways to capitalize on the internet. They’re not raking it in, but many publications have found an uneasy way to survive.
But without eyeballs, internet advertising revenue is bound to start fleeing. That’s what happened in Spain, where the government tried something similar, and Facebook and Google just said “okay, we won’t link to papers anymore.”
And in Spain, the newspapers rather quickly asked the government to stop helping, because it was killing them.
Meanwhile, in Australia, a similar bill to the one the Canadian Government passed appears to have succeeded. But appearances can be deceiving.
Because Australia, despite all the comparisons to Canada, isn’t Canada. And so Meta and Google have both entered into a revenue sharing agreement.
But Canada? Canada is the US’s top hat, or maybe the States are our nadir. Either way, losing the $0.50 in change that Canadian publications generate for Meta isn’t much of a hit. But losing the American news sources from the American site might hurt a bit more, and they don’t want to test that. So they’re probably going to play hardball with Canada until Canadian media cries uncle.
But the question you were asking was this: how does this affect Tumbler RidgeLines?
It doesn’t. Because I, in my infinite wisdom and laziness, never made any effort to monetize the Tumbler RidgeLines website.
But it might impact you. While I might start posting stories directly to Facebook as well as the website, probably not (see earlier comment about being lazy). That means you may miss some important news.
You don’t have to. You can pick up the paper in dead tree form, you can go to the website and sign up for email notifications, or you could, um. Nope, those are your options. Wait. You could use an RSS reader and get stories that way.
And even if all you do is read the paper online? You can still donate: www.patreon.com/tumblerridgelines. Thanks.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
