‘We’ll continue to engage with the government’: Meta open to keeping news on Facebook
After declaring that “people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content” when announcing it will shut down Facebook News in Australia, Meta has now told Mumbrella it is open to keeping local news articles on its social media platforms.
This comes as Nine, Seven, and News Corp have all announced newsroom redundancies credited to the drying up of payments made to them by Meta in exchange for using their news content.
Nine Publishing managing director Tory Maguire confirmed earlier this month that payments from Meta had stopped, telling staff, “the only thing we know for certain is that a very large chunk of revenue is coming out of our P&L. And the tap turned off last week”.
As a result of this lost income, Nine has since shut down youth publications Refinery29, Gizmodo, Vice, Kotaku, and Lifehacker, making dozens of staff at these publications redundant.
As noted by Capital Brief this week, The Daily Aus and Broadsheet Media have also warned that half of their revenue would be impacted if Meta’s news ban is successful.
These claims were made in a new submission to the Federal Government’s joint committee on social media.
“A 50% revenue cut as a result of TDA’s removal from Meta would necessitate staff redundancies, limit our ability to provide free news, and stifle future growth and technological innovation,” the submission reads.
“This operational setback would be a major blow to diversity in the Australian media, reducing the variety of voices and perspectives available to the public.”
A Meta spokesperson has since told Mumbrella: “At the moment all options are on the table,” adding that they never said they were ‘axing’ news but are “exploring all options” regarding serving news on their platform.
“We hope the government sees the many benefits our free services provide to publishers, including small and independent publishers, and we’ll continue to engage with the government on this topic.”
Mumbrella has contacted Seven West Media, Nine Entertainment and News Corp Australia for comment.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Would correct this article – neither TDA or Broadsheet are getting 50% of their revenue from Meta ‘payments’ or anything related to news bargaining code. in their submissions they claim 50% of their revenue is generated from Meta traffic and this is at risk.
What it means ultimately is both of these non news businesses built themselves off Meta (so really their customers are Meta customers).
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Not a single job that has been cut will return – don’t listen to these dinosaurs!
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The News Media Bargaining Code was never anything more than a stay of execution for these publishers and the fact that they saw this as anything more is a failure to adapt by Senior Management, encapsulated in this quote:
“the only thing we know for certain is that a very large chunk of revenue is coming out of our P&L. And the tap turned off last week”.
Did they really think this ‘tap’ of revenue would be endless and not make plans to wean themselves off of it? Clearly not.
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