‘Meta is attempting to mislead Australians’: Media bosses, Free TV Australia respond to Meta
Free TV Australia has responded to Meta’s announcement that it will not be renewing any commercial deals with Australian media companies, saying the media giant should be met with swift action by the Australian Government.
Earlier on Friday, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, announced it will shut down Facebook News in Australia from next month, in an “ongoing effort to better align [their] investments”, as well as not continue contracts under the News Media Bargaining Code.
This argument always seemed completely asinine to me. Facebook drives the traffic and gets the benefit of the comments and discussion, because Media Publishers haven’t figured out how to manage a comment section properly and do a p*ss poor job of it. They only go after Facebook because that’s where the money is. They never mention Reddit which as of last month actually has more monthly visits than Instagram and exists primarily for posting news links and hosting discussion of the content contained in those links.
If a local newspaper posts a movie review in their culture section which contains a small synopsis of the movie’s story, should the production company demand that the newspaper pay them a fee? Or argue that people who read the paper are less likely to see the movie because they experienced the movie by reading a one sentence synopsis? Of course not. Because they’re benefitting from the placement of that review, just like Newscorp and Nine benefit from the placement of their content on Social Media.
What they’re complaining about is the fact that nobody clicks on the links because the story is often in the headline because it’s 99% cheap clickbait journalism.
That’s why Newscorp would never go after Reddit btw. They’d lose half of their content, given the entire bullpen seemingly spends their working day trawling r/australia and r/ausfinance for content.
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Hank S – there is a huge difference between Reddit and Facebook. Reddit never tried to deceive publishers into investing so much of their content into the platform only to shift the algorithms away from the publishers – so much that organic reach is basically zero and you have to pay to get any kind of views. Reddit is a straight up clickthrough – which genuinely benefits publishers. Also Reddit never tried to keep creating functions that are literally designed to trap the users on its platforms rather than click through to the publisher – remember the scam that was Facebook AMP?
I wouldn’t get too attached to the way Reddit operates currently Jay. They’ve already locked down their API and are going IPO this month. with registrations ending tomorrow.
Once they’re public, I’d expect them to operate off the same playbook that Facebook and Google have.
That’s not really the point though is it?
You were trying to devalue the code by saying publishers are just cherrypicking and rentseeking, and lumping two very different platforms into the same category – literal apples and oranges.