"The party spent nearly $15,000 on over 1,000 ads in the past month."
Oh no! Fifteen thousand dollars?! I'm sure Facebook is shaking and crying and will reverse their decision immediately.
Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
61–70 of 203 posts
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if you think newspapers are vital to democracy, that doesn't oblige other businesses to sell newspapers. These newspapers own their own distribution mechanisms (websites) that are unaffected by the decision of one third party website to part ways with them. Okay, but facebook is really ubiquitous so that makes it different... How is this any different from... the one grocery store in town removing their newspape…
It is, however, an interesting hypothetical to ask: if journalism itself is entirely unprofitable, such that all the newspaper companies eventually shut down, and private journalism stops being done — then what should we, as a public, do to retain our duty to be informed? Can there be such a thing as "non-partisan state-sponsored media"?
If there were any enforceable duty to be informed. People would be buy newspaper subscriptions already to keep them running.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#63Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? There…
> And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? Don’t those news sources have ads too ? How are they making income from local views?
Yes they do. But the income from one story doesn't pay the cost to generate all the other stories that the paper produces. According to our local paper that just shut down, their ads couldn't compete with the ads on Google/Facebook.
So the only profitable stories are very narrow, or the click-bait type that might be picked up by Facebook, assuming that Facebook doesn't just extract and show the core of the story.
This isn't a new problem. A friend of mine used to do articles on historical issues and post them on his blog. They were good enough that there were other sites that would just copy them and change the byline to themselves. Grounds for a lawsuit, but the cost of the lawsuit and the tiny amount of damages made it impractical. Now he does the articles but tries to sell them to publishers. His income from that is now so tiny that it's no longer cost effective.
Local papers now are money-losers, and the centralization of those many papers in the hands of a few corporations seems more to provide political influence than make money from news. In our recent election, the 160 papers owned by one corporation all made the same political endorsements.
Australia's moves to charge for local news was a first, I think, and at the time there was comment that it could be the wave of the future. Google/Facebook have financial incentive to try to head off the same action in other countries.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's kind of weird to describe FB users as being in a cage where their browser is incapable of going anywhere else.
But FB exactly wants users to stay within their "walled garden".
There are no walls in this garden. They might want people to stay but they have to work for that.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because our government doesn't understand technology and generally gets fleeced anytime they encounter it. Remember the Phenix pay system? It was an IBM project that was supposed to save us 70 million a year, instead they paid IBM an additional 2+ BILLION to try and fix the broken crap they'd delivered. Never even worked, they're currently taking bids to replace it already. 80% of public servants had pay issues, many…
> Remember the Phenix pay system? It was an IBM project that was supposed to save us 70 million a year, instead they paid IBM an additional 2+ BILLION to try and fix the broken crap they'd delivered. Never even worked, they're currently taking bids to replace it already. Do you really believe that this was a result of bad in-the-moment decision-making at all levels, instead of a result of being trapped by previously-…
Actually, they're as bad as everyone else at that, e.g, Obamacare website; state of Maine website; lots more.
And then we have, by three or four orders of magnitude, the great Sunk Cost Fallacy of all time, by anyone ever:
Not ending World War One in 1915, 1916, or 1917: "All those lives and treasure we've spent! We have to get something for it."
And so we had the Spanish Flu, which killed more than the combat deaths, and of course, the combat deaths.
https://www.history.com/news/spanish-flu
Not to mention World War Two.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the issue that Facebook/Google don't just share the link, they share the content behind the link as well?
No, the entire complaint about Facebook and Google is the links themselves. It's not anything about embedding articles (which I don't think either company does). They just show the headline and article metadata provided by the news publishers.
There are places where they embed the news itself, but that’s a separate issue that’s already been resolved - they pay the publishers for that. Ironically, one of the results of bill C 18 is that those existing deals will get cancelled.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
The government needs to get out messages to its citizens. If ads on facebook is more cost effective than sending out mailers or whatever, why shouldn't they spend money on facebook ads?
Because our government doesn't understand technology and generally gets fleeced anytime they encounter it. Remember the Phenix pay system? It was an IBM project that was supposed to save us 70 million a year, instead they paid IBM an additional 2+ BILLION to try and fix the broken crap they'd delivered. Never even worked, they're currently taking bids to replace it already. 80% of public servants had pay issues, many…
Sounds to me like you should fix those problems rather than just giving up altogether.
The idea that there is something fundamental about governments that maeks them incapable of doing these things correctly is nonsense.
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#68Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? There…
If you'd like to understand what Google is actually doing with the news, it's outlined here.
https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/CHPC/Brief/B...
And Jeff Elgie provides an informed view:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/village-medias-c-18-update-je...
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#69Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? There…
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…
> […] but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline.
People have been not-reading and commenting since the early days of Slashdot. See also Reddit and HN. :)
Re: Ottawa pulls advertising, escalating showdown with Facebook and Instagram
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the issue that Facebook/Google don't just share the link, they share the content behind the link as well?
Close. Sharing it on Facebook means you’ll comment on the story on Facebook and not on the linked website hosting the comment. Facebook gets the linger time to show you more ads but the organization doing the actual reporting misses out.
If someone didn't read the article, then why would you expect them to spend time on your website?
This seems really odd to me.