Earlier quoted context omitted.
My issue with this, is this a problem that needs to be solved? Do we need to guarantee monetization of every human interaction? If my friend and I go a cafe, see a newspaper headline, and have a discussion about that headline without ever opening that newspaper should the cafe have to pay for that discussion? Why should any media adjacent interaction anywhere happen without payment? If the cafe is playing music, they…
In your example the cafe isn't monetizing the fact that you view the headline and comment, which inherently increases the advertising value of the cafe (i.e. more people won't come to the cafe because of the headlines and their need to comment on it) and which captures significantly more value than everyone else involved. You just read the headline, a few people buy the paper and everyone is equitable and happy. If M…
Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
91–100 of 203 posts
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
My issue with this, is this a problem that needs to be solved? Do we need to guarantee monetization of every human interaction? If my friend and I go a cafe, see a newspaper headline, and have a discussion about that headline without ever opening that newspaper should the cafe have to pay for that discussion? Why should any media adjacent interaction anywhere happen without payment? If the cafe is playing music, they…
No, but if you're a government seeing your media industry shrinking because they can't make a profit to sustain themselves, meanwhile others are profiting off their work, then you want to try something, and I guess this is their attempt. One of the other solutions proposed was taxes on media aggregators. This is similar to the taxes on entertainment aggregators currently in place that pay into a fund that supports do…
If the intention is to get Canadians to focus more on local news, making Facebook pay to link to local news is completely backwards. Facebook will (and apparently has) simply transition to showing cheap international news. Instead, Canada should be making Facebook pay when linking to foreign news, or paying Facebook when linking to local news.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
My issue with this, is this a problem that needs to be solved? Do we need to guarantee monetization of every human interaction? If my friend and I go a cafe, see a newspaper headline, and have a discussion about that headline without ever opening that newspaper should the cafe have to pay for that discussion? Why should any media adjacent interaction anywhere happen without payment? If the cafe is playing music, they…
I believe the problem is that the situation you describe occurs on a much bigger scale. It’s no longer you and your friend in the cafe; it’s millions of people looking at the headline on the screen.
Even on Facebook, if I comment on a headline it's still just me making that comment. I, singular, provide some value to Facebook by being there and no value to newspaper because I didn't click though. If Facebook didn't exist, the value I bring to the newspaper by not reading it is the same.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#94Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
My issue with this, is this a problem that needs to be solved? Do we need to guarantee monetization of every human interaction? If my friend and I go a cafe, see a newspaper headline, and have a discussion about that headline without ever opening that newspaper should the cafe have to pay for that discussion? Why should any media adjacent interaction anywhere happen without payment? If the cafe is playing music, they…
No, but if you're a government seeing your media industry shrinking because they can't make a profit to sustain themselves, meanwhile others are profiting off their work, then you want to try something, and I guess this is their attempt. One of the other solutions proposed was taxes on media aggregators. This is similar to the taxes on entertainment aggregators currently in place that pay into a fund that supports do…
When the market for classifieds disappeared, there was no longer any financial support for local news.
You could even argue that newspapers were only viable businesses because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of information. It was never the news itself that was profitable but being the local gatekeeper of that news. The Internet destroyed that entirely.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same reason it, and other governments advertise programs, PSAs, etc, on television, YouTube, etc. It reaches eyeballs.
We have tax-backed CBC for that (+other tax supported media)
Most government advertising is brand/awareness advertising, which is pretty cheap when other brands aren't competing for the same keywords as you.
And the cost of running a government ad on CBC is non-zero. It could be occupying space used for a program people actually want to watch/listen to.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding of the core issue is people aren’t clicking through to read the article, but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline. Facebook gets ad views and user-generated content/comments, and the organization doing the reporting sees nothing of the economic value generated in this scenario. (Hacker News is specialized in audience and news orgs generally aren’t posting all their stories here) CBC t…
My issue with this, is this a problem that needs to be solved? Do we need to guarantee monetization of every human interaction? If my friend and I go a cafe, see a newspaper headline, and have a discussion about that headline without ever opening that newspaper should the cafe have to pay for that discussion? Why should any media adjacent interaction anywhere happen without payment? If the cafe is playing music, they…
Trying to monetize and compensate for every externality is absurd.
If I make coffee at home that causes a coffee shop to lose out on Revenue. Surely I'm not responsible for paying the coffee shop for the Lost Revenue.
If I do go to the coffee shop, should the coffee shop have to share their revenue with the car company because it gave me a reason to drive my car?
In this case, social media makes money because people talk about news online instead of actually read it. This doesn't make social media companies responsible for the fact that no one wants to read a news article.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#98Seeding control of the mainstream media narrative over this silly law is going to have hilarious implications for the future of the Canadian government. Most importantly, it's now 10x harder to control the narrative and for the government to manufacture consent.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#99Well, I'm surprised that no one's brought up a similar case that occurred in the EU and which focused primarily on Google's news aggregation service, rather than Meta's.
One significant difference was that the publisher/holding company initiated and won the lawsuit against Google at the national level (see for example this EFF article from 2014: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/12/google-news-shuts-shop... ). From what I vaguely remember about the case, Google's ability to shut down its news service in Spain only (while keeping it running in neighboring countries) was what ultimately allowed it to demonstrate that the news aggregation service had benefitted the publishers rather than costing them revenue, because once they halted their aggregation service in Spain only, Internet traffic to the publications affected was substantially reduced. I assume the lawsuits in Australia and now Canada were initiated on a similar premise, i.e. that Google, et al. Were negatively impacting revenue, rather than bolstering it by referring additional traffic beyond what they would otherwise receive. In other words,
In the European case, what happened next was that publishers, realizing they couldn't win at the national level (actually, they couldn't reasonably win at any level, since their principal claim had already been invalidated at the national level) took it up to the EU level. They still wanted to be paid of course, regardless of the validity of their allegation, so they figured that if they could get a law (or amendment) passed at the EU Commission level, then this would be binding for all member states--and Google's only response would be to shut down their aggregation service completely in the EU, or accept the demand to play for each news article headline/summary that was hosted on their site.
The amendment that was ultimately passed was something quite byzantine as well, since it forbade any exceptions (to prevent Google from only hosting headlines that came from blogs or other, relatively unknown news services that were prepared to "forego" revenue (due to Google reducing their visitor count, as claimed), in return for the privilege of receiving tons of exposure for being hosted on Google's aggregator. The idea was (IIRC) was that there would be a pool of funds that would be disproportionately divided based on the relative portion of total traffic that each site received--which, needless to say, benefitted the big and well known publishers, while hurting the smaller ones (blogs) that didn't receive much money from this pool, but was still forced by law to participate in this scheme.
Which brings me to the final point: if the law that was passed in Canada has anything in common with the EU law (ie to force Google to pay their "fair share"), then the case against Meta/Facebook is a legal extortion racket, sanctioned by the government.
There were numerous articles, legal opinions, etc posted around that time, several by the EFF (again, based on my vague recollection).
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but if you're a government seeing your media industry shrinking because they can't make a profit to sustain themselves, meanwhile others are profiting off their work, then you want to try something, and I guess this is their attempt. One of the other solutions proposed was taxes on media aggregators. This is similar to the taxes on entertainment aggregators currently in place that pay into a fund that supports do…
The real threat to local news is Craigslist and Facebook marketplace. Local newspapers were mostly funded by their classifieds section. The news is merely to bring eyeballs to those ads. When the market for classifieds disappeared, there was no longer any financial support for local news. You could even argue that newspapers were only viable businesses because they had a monopoly over the local distribution of inform…
Not to worry, several US states still have draconian laws to keep the local newspaper in business. In NYS, when you start a LLC or corp, you have to publish an announcement in 2 papers in the state announcing it and get certificates from the paper proving it. Of course there are ever so convenient "business papers" to leech off it. Some law makers tried to change that a few years ago and queue the lobbyist outrage.