traffic – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Elon Claims Twitter’s Traffic Is At An All-Time High Because He Can’t Be Bothered To Understand The Misleading Data People Show Him

from the confirmation-bias-is-stronger-than-ketamine dept

Elon Musk is like the most gullible confirmation bias sucker who has ever existed. If you present him with literally anything that confirms his priors, no matter how obviously bullshit, he’ll run with it as truth. His Twitter feed is just non-stop stupid people feeding him nonsense, and when he sees something he agrees with, he immediately promotes it, no questions asked.

For example, last week he tweeted that traffic on ExTwitter had reached an “all-time high,” even though any human being with more than two brain cells to rub together would look at this graph and say “that… is clearly not right.”

The chart, which is oddly labeled “X Organic Traffic (12 years),” shows some ups and downs of traffic until early 2023 (about 5 or 6 months after Elon took over). Then the traffic suddenly jumps in basically the course of a day from somewhere around 1 billion (units are not given) to 2.5 billion, and then that number crawls upwards to about 3.3 billion today.

Even the most gullible sucker in the world (except, apparently, Elon) would maybe pause to wonder why there was that massive more than 2x jump at that one point. Possibly Elon thought it was all because traffic jumped in a single day once he took over or whatever.

But we already know that’s not even remotely true. Part of that is due to numbers Elon himself released, where he confirmed (without realizing it) that users on ExTwitter had declined precipitously. Since then, others have confirmed that ExTwitter’s traffic continues to be in the shitter. SensorTower, which tracks app downloads, noted that basically all social media apps have been on the decline lately, but ExTwitter’s decline in downloads stands out below all the rest.

So, what the fuck is actually going on in that chart that Musk posted? It had to be based on something. Thankfully, SocialMediaToday’s Andrew Hutchinson worked out the details, which show that (once again) you should never believe anything that Elon Musk actually says when talking about some information people gave him. Because he doesn’t understand it.

The data is from SEMrush, one of the more well-known tools that measure search engine referral traffic. And that’s what it’s looking at. It is looking at how much search engine referral traffic there is to Twitter, not “traffic.” Just how much traffic is coming from Google to Twitter.

So, then what is the giant bump? It turns out that it happened in April of 2023, just as Twitter turned off its free API access for most users. This had people speculating that it had something to do with that.

But the answer was actually even more mundane. That was also when SEMRush changed how it measured search engine referral traffic, causing such numbers to spike for everyone.

“Upon reviewing the report, there appears to be a misunderstanding about the organic traffic values. The spike observed in the data corresponds with an update we implemented. This update, executed on April 6th, resulted in additional data being incorporated into our metrics (that is the SERP Features). Consequently, this led to spikes in figures in our toolkit across all websites, not exclusively Twitter.”

In other words, comparing those numbers after April 2023 with those before April 2023 is like comparing apples to oranges.

So, no, Twitter has not reached record highs. No, that chart is not showing major growth. All indications (including Twitter’s own self-reported numbers) suggest that the platform is, at best, stagnant, and more likely losing users rapidly.

But, Elon is so gullible and so desperate to believe his own bullshit that he saw someone post such a chart and immediately assumed it must be true, even as anyone who thought about it would pause to try to figure out why there was such a big leap.

Filed Under: confirmation bias, elon musk, referral traffic, traffic
Companies: semrush, twitter, x

Media Sites That Have Left Twitter Aren’t Missing The Traffic

from the which-is-probably-fine-by-elon dept

Elon Musk has made it clear that he’s no fan of the media. And while he seems to whine and pout when big media sites leave exTwitter, he keeps insisting that exTwitter doesn’t need journalists, because the his view of citizen journalism will magically be so much better. Of course, at the same time, he seemed to think that the media needed exTwitter so much that they’d pay $1,000/month to be verified, which basically did not happen.

Then, of course, there’s the recent nonsense of taking headlines away from link cards, which is a very anti-media move. And, of course, disabling the API made it so that sites like Techdirt no longer post to exTwitter at all, because we’d now have to do it manually, which is stupid. And while Twitter had been a decent driver of traffic over the years, it was never that big. And we’ve seen no clear decline in visits since Musk cut us off by cutting off the API.

It appears that others are seeing the same. Take NPR, which famously bailed on exTwitter after Elon falsely labeled them as “state-affiliated media” in contradiction with the company’s own explanation of what qualifies for such a label (which explicitly called out NPR as not qualifying). Elon did that to punish the respected media organization after he didn’t like some of the reporting they had done.

NPR made the correct decision to say “fuck this” and stop posting to its account.

Musk made some noise about how the organization would regret it, but… according to NiemanReports, it looks like there’s no regret to be found:

A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

There’s one view of these numbers that confirms what many of us in news have long suspected — that Twitter wasn’t worth the effort, at least in terms of traffic. “It made up so little of our web traffic, such a marginal amount,” says Gabe Rosenberg, audience editor for KCUR in Kansas City, which stopped posting to Twitter at the same time as NPR.

Again, Musk will insist this doesn’t matter. He’ll claim that media that isn’t on exTwitter is missing out and that the users of the site are replacing the media he hates. And, who knows, perhaps it’ll happen. But so far, what the media is learning is that it just doesn’t need Elon at all.

Filed Under: elon musk, journalism, media, referral, traffic
Companies: npr, twitter, x

News Publishers Admit They Get Value From Search Traffic, Even As They Demand Extra Compensation For It

from the revealing-their-true-beliefs dept

In recent years, major media organizations have been lobbying Congress to enact legislation, the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act,” requiring search engine providers to engage in a form of collective bargaining about the tax they would pay to media publishers for the privilege of providing links to their news articles, backed up by mandatory interest arbitration in which the thumb would be placed on the scales by simply assuming that the search engine companies could not refuse to provide links and would be required to pay something. The contention of the “News Media Alliance” has been that the search engines take value (access to news reporting that is expensive to produce) and provide nothing in return.

I have never been persuaded by the arguments for this bill, so I have long argued against it (and Public Citizen has never taken a position). Yes, news is expensive to produce (especially quality news), and the pervasiveness of online advertising has destroyed a major source of the media’s former revenue stream. Moreover, journalism is a social good that is vital to our democracy, at the local level as well as nationally, and it needs to be supported somehow (I put my money where my mouth is – our own family gets two newspapers in the dead tree edition every morning, and we subscribe to other publications).

But it always seemed to me that search engines provide value to the media – traffic to media websites,. Beyond that I am troubled by the First Amendment implications of creating a modern version of the tort of “hot news misappropriation,” not to speak of the “compelled speech” implications of requiring search engine companies to provide links and payments to speakers whose content they might abhor. (The proposed statute would make it illegal for search engines to deny links to any entity represented in the collective bargaining process).

And it is easy to see through the news media’s economic argument. Such simple devices as robots.txt, “noindex,” and password protection could wall off any news media web page from search engines. But no media companies were doing that, because they WANT the traffic delivered by search engines. So it has always been clear that the media recognized the value of being seen by search engines.

The Ugly Truth

And now they admit it.

Now that the media feel threatened by new AI Search tools, which would deliver whole paragraphs in answer to search engine queries, the media industry’s lies about the economics of their relationship with search engines have been revealed.

The New York Times carries a story this morning, “Publishers Gird for Threat from A.I.” that includes these revealing admissions.

“Content publishers have an uneven but largely reciprocal relationship with search engines. The search sites benefit from having trusted sources of information in the results, and the publishers benefit from the traffic to their sites that the search engines generate.

“Search traffic from Google accounts for half of overall visits, or more, to many sites, said Brian Morrissey, who writes The Rebooting, a media business newsletter.

‘Search has been the mainstay of the publishing business on the internet,’ he said.”

And then there is this

“Kyle Sutton, director of search and product at the newspaper publisher Gannett, said the relationship had, until now, been mutually beneficial.

‘While all search results are taking from our data and, from our perspective, crawling our content, aggregating our content, there is the return there of them driving traffic to our site,’ Mr. Sutton said. ‘So I think that relationship is kind of first and foremost what we want to see maintained.’”

It would be worth looking to past hearings on the JCPA to see whether Sutton (or anybody else from Gannett) has testified under oath in contradiction to these startling admissions.

Legislation for the Future

The Times story indicates that the longtime sponsors of the JCPA plan to reintroduce that bill this week, but why? The news media now admit that they like the status quo; the JCPA would disrupt it. Of course, members of Congress love their media endorsements, so their willingness to truckle to local media should not be underestimated. But it makes sense to put a hold on the JCPA and think about a different kind of legislation.

Unlike search snippets, the delivery of entire paragraphs implicates copyright, without any need to create a new cause of action. And either an economic or a statutory compromise may be needed to avoid years of litigation over whether the replication of entire paragraphs of copyrighted text qualifies as fair use. Those considerations can only be resolved after years of high-stakes litigation and damages awards, as lower courts decide cases, legal tests develop, circuits disagree, and the Supreme Court weighs in, perhaps more than once.

Search engine operators and media groupings may want to enter into negotiations about the forms of payment that are required when entire paragraphs are being copied. A statute embodying such standards might take the form of compulsory licensing and some system of assessing appropriate payments for use, not just to the news media but to other sources of substantial online content.

The standards that are set by such discussions could well influence the fair use analysis as applied to non-participants, comparable to the models that the “Best Practices” initiatives pioneered by Peter Jaszi and his colleagues in American University’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property have set in several areas of the law. The compensation systems set by such negotiations might also establish a market standard for lost license fees to be awarded in copyright litigation.

Paul Alan Levy is an attorney for Public Citizen Litigation Group. This post originally appeared on its Consumer Law & Policy blog, and is reposted here with permission.

Filed Under: jcpa, journalism, link tax, search, traffic
Companies: gannett

Legacy News Orgs’ Hatred Of Google Runs So Deep They’re Willing To Give Up Fair Use To Punish Google

from the failing-at-innovating dept

We’ve been writing a bit about the JCPA — the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act — the very bad bill from Senator Amy Klobuchar that would create all sorts of problems, from allowing news orgs to demand money for links (breaking the fundamental nature of how the web works), to creating a “must carry” provision that could force disinformation providers into Google News, to an underhanded method of trying to revamp copyright law, without ever admitting its revamping copyright law. We’ve explained all of these problems in previous posts.

Of course, the bill’s momentum was paused last week when Senator Ted Cruz used it as an opportunity to try to force in a “no moderation” rule, though apparently, if Klobuchar can cut a deal with others, it will return to markup tomorrow.

Either way, the main group lobbying for the bill, the News Media Alliance, the organization formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America (which has long been a mouthpiece for Rupert Murdoch’s dreams and wishes) has put out an absolutely bizarre paper attacking Google following the events of last week. I mean, there are plenty of legitimate things to yell at Google about, but the NMA is so focused on this belief that Google owes it money (because Google innovated while the NMA members sat back and watched their monopoly markets disappear out from under them), that it’s willing to undermine the interests of the actual journalists its members employ.

Specifically: the paper is an attack on fair use. This is interesting on multiple levels, starting with the fact that the supporters of the JCPA keep insisting that the JCPA doesn’t touch copyright law (even though it clearly does). But, equally ridiculous, is the fact that journalists rely on fair use all the time. These tired, flailing, legacy news organizations are so obsessed with Google they’re willing to shoot and kill provisions of copyright law that help them the most.

As set forth in this White Paper, many of Google’s current uses of news content likely exceed the boundaries of fair use under the Copyright Act. Given that reality, Google should have to negotiate an appropriate use-specific license with news publishers for each use of their content.

If they truly believe that, they should sue Google for copyright infringement, not push to get the JCPA passed. But they don’t believe it, because it’s laughable.

In a competitive market, news publishers would be able to resist Google’s demands by withholding their content unless and until acceptable terms were negotiated. But as set forth below, Google has so much power as the dominant online platform, with the ability to play one publisher off the other, that it has been able to effectively secure acquiescence from the news publishers for its activities, which often are harmful to publishers. At base, there has been a market failure in the news publishers’ ability to exercise the rights granted to them under the Copyright Act.

Look, I’ll make this very clear: if you’re relying on Google traffic for your news org, you’ve failed. You’re a bad publisher and you deserve to go out of business. I say that as a publisher that gets only a tiny fraction of our traffic from Google. Instead of relying on Google, we (and other smart news orgs) focus on building loyal audiences. Find your market, and build a community of people who go to you. Google traffic is just a bonus — a chance to convert new readers into long term community members.

But, of course, these old, flailing media organizations don’t know how to do that. They had years where they were actual monopolies: often the only game in town for local news, and they sat, fat and happy, collecting monopoly rents from local advertisers via classified ads.

Then the internet came along and the newspapers refused to innovate. They were still rolling in cash and mocked the internet. Until suddenly each piece of their monopoly got pealed off, bit by bit. And not by Google, but by the internet as a whole. Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, Nextdoor, Facebook, Airbnb, and many others picked off different parts of the old newspaper’s captive audience.

As we’ve said for years, the news business is a community business. And, for years, the newspaper was basically the only “community” offering for many people. But the internet disaggregated communities, and enabled tons of new communities. And, eventually, both users and advertisers realized there were better options — ones that treated them like valued members of a community, rather than looking down on them.

Newspapers could have adapted. Some did. Other publications have adapted as well.

But, many didn’t. And their response is to blame Google — and then jealously insist that a huge portion of Google’s revenue “belongs” to them. The JCPA and this nonsense white paper are both attempts to simply demand a wealth transfer from some of the companies that innovated and provided better tools for communities and advertisers… to those who didn’t.

That it’s being pushed by an organization that is really a mouthpiece for Rupert Murdoch should be a clear condemnation of Murdoch’s years of pretending that he supported the free market and fair competition, and that he was against government interference in the market. The JCPA is literally demanding government interfere in the marketplace, to seize money from successful companies to give it to those companies that didn’t even try to innovate.

The argument is nonsense for many reasons — including the fact that very little Google News screens show any ads at all. It’s not as if Google is raking in the cash. Second, all this does is send news orgs traffic and the fact that they can’t figure out how to monetize that traffic is on them, not Google.

The paper claims otherwise, but this is really a damning statement about themselves:

Google Search is increasingly becoming a “walled garden” — a final destination rather than an electronic pointer to news websites. Google has again used its market dominant position to force acquiescence to new features that diminish the chances that users will visit the news websites.

First off, this is bullshit. If you’re talking about news, if whatever snippet Google shows is enough to satisfy readers not to click through then the news you’re providing doesn’t have much value. Good reporting isn’t fully summed up in a headline or a snippet. Those things make you click through.

What the NMA is really admitting here is that its members are shitty journalists who add so little value that no one needs to actually read their articles beyond the headline and a short snippet. What a bizarre thing to admit.

What’s hilarious is that on the very same page that it has that statement above about “walled gardens” the paper admits the exact opposite is true.

Google’s use of news publishers’ content does send substantial traffic to news publishers, but Google is not fairly or appropriately compensating news publishers for the value of their material, or properly treating the news industry as an important strategic partner. Instead, as set forth in this White Paper, Google has misused its position as the dominant online platform to reap the benefits of the news media’s substantial investments in reporting without paying a license fee.

Who could possibly take this paper seriously when they’re admitting that their claims of the walled garden are full of shit.

On top of that, again, you don’t need a license to link. You just don’t. So this demand for “a license fee” makes no sense.

The paper’s attack on fair use is also quite troubling. It specifically insists that a seminal fair use decision, Google’s big win against Perfect 10, should no longer be considered good law.

What considerations led the Perfect 10 court to hold in 2007 that Google’s use of thumbnail photographs in its search engine was fair? First, Google’s search engine was not seen as an ultimate destination or publisher, but as merely as a tool or “pointer” providing direct access to the original website containing the original copyrighted material – and hence a “transformative” use. This was in keeping with Larry Page’s vision at the time; as he told an interviewer in 2004, “We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible.”3 Second, the court did not see Google as heavily commercial. AdWords was still relatively nascent, and courts had yet to fully appreciate the significance of search advertising. Further, the low-quality, grainy thumbnail images in Google search results at that time were not viewed as a substitute for the original image and had no independent aesthetic appeal. Critically, the court also did not perceive a search engine as creating any market harm for the original publisher. Finally, the court viewed Google’s indexing of the plaintiff’s images as “incidental” and found that Google was acting in keeping with principles of good faith and fair dealing. At the core of its reasoning, the court concluded that the goal of the Copyright Act was to incentivize the progress of science and the arts, and that the public benefits of the search engine outweighed any minimal impact of the use on the original website’s incentive to create.

Basically, all of that is wrong. Again, just a page earlier, this very paper admitted that Google sends substantial traffic to publishers. So, the first point still holds. The second point still holds for news as well. Google has no ads on Google News, and it is not a key part of Google’s commercial interests. And, third, the public benefit of being able to find news stories still stands.

And, again, more importantly, if the NMA and its members really believe this, go test it in court. Put up or shut up.

It’s amazing how much of this paper is a self own of just how bad the NMA members are at their jobs. I mean, this is the example they show of how Google News makes sure people don’t click through to news orgs’ actual stories:

That’s showing just a tiny snippet from seven different news orgs, but none of them tell anything even remotely close to a full story. If I saw that, I’d click through to find out the details.

I mean, it seems like what the NMA is really complaining about here is the fact that news consumers get to see _multiple news orgs_‘ version of the story, rather than being shunted to just one monopolistic local provider.

So sad, NMA, your members have to compete with each other. Boo fucking hoo.

And, again, the NMA’s own paper immediately admits that its concerns about the walled garden are bogus:

By the time the user views the full collection of articles in the “carousel” format, the user often knows the high points of the news story. Although some news publishers get decent traffic from the Google News app, in the view of many in the news industry the Google News app — with its aggregation of content by topic, combined with high-quality photos, headlines, and snippets in “carousels” — can satisfy the reader about the “news of the day” without ever having to click through on any given story

Hey, NMA, maybe, rather than just demanding money from Google, you should talk to the news publishers who get “decent traffic from the Google News app” and figure out how they do it, rather than listening to the lazy ass publishers who provide so little value that the headline and snippet alone “can satisfy the reader about the ‘news of the day.'”

Anyway, the paper goes on and on, and makes clear two things over and over again:

NMA news orgs are shit at their jobs. They refuse to innovate. They refuse to try to build real community. They rely on Google for too much traffic rather than doing anything to build a loyal audience. They can’t figure out how to add enough value to the actual news that people care beyond the headline and a snippet.

Honestly, given all that, it seems like some of those news orgs should go out of business and clear space for organizations that actually serve a community.

Second: for all the many claims that the JCPA is not about copyright at all, this paper reveals that the NMA absolutely believes it’s about copyright. But, rather than test its laughable fair use theories in court, it’s convinced Amy Klobuchar to do an end run around copyright law, insisting that the JCPA has nothing to do with copyright, while still demanding licenses. Licenses are about copyright. Because fair use means you don’t need a license. That’s kind of fundamental.

Third: despite how much the NMA’s members all heavily rely on fair use themselves, they’re willing to burn it all down if it means that Congress will force Google to throw some spare change at them. It’s just sad.

This whole document is fairly pathetic. I mean, look, if I were running the NMA and my members were as pathetic as the NMA’s members apparently are, I guess I’d probably demand cash from Google too. But it doesn’t make it a good idea.

A smart NMA would be helping its members innovate. But, that would require actually doing work, and that’s not Rupert Murdoch’s style.

Filed Under: community, copyright, fair use, innovation, jcpa, journalism, traffic
Companies: google, news media alliance, nma

Colorado Transportation Officals Asked Navigation App Providers To Plant False Information. Worse, The Providers Complied.

from the slippery-slope-of-faking-slippery-slopes dept

Well, this isn’t cool. Colorado transportation officials fed bogus information to map apps to make an open road appear to be closed.

Hoping to keep traffic from rerouting to a smaller road after a larger highway was closed due to rockslides, the Colorado Department of Transportation did this:

[T]he Colorado Department of Transportation marked the road as closed on its travelers update site http://www.cotrip.org because of a “safety closure due to mudslide,” and Pitkin County Undersheriff Alex Burchetta said Wednesday afternoon the county sent out an alert about 3:30 p.m. as such, based on that information.

However, there were not any mudslides and the messaging “evolved” and was changed by CDOT, Burchetta said. A CDOT spokesperson confirmed there were no slides.

That affected the DOT’s own site, which is itself problematic. Drivers depend on that information being accurate. Falsifying reports for the purpose of controlling traffic flow shouldn’t be considered acceptable.

But that wasn’t the only travel information outlet affected by the DOT’s shady traffic shaping.

Gregg Miller, a CDOT business process architect, was tasked with contacting the navigation services when agency officials were desperately trying to prevent motorists from flooding Highway 82 during the closure of Interstate 70 through Glenwood Canyon because of mudslides and the ensuing damage.

Traffic levels were hitting an estimated 7,000 to 9,000 vehicles per day during the week of Aug. 1 compared to a normal load of 1,000 vehicles per day, one official estimated.

John Lorme, CDOT director of maintenance and operations, directed Miller via email on Aug. 4 at 11:49 a.m. to get the roads closed on the navigation services.

“I need this to show closed to traffic on the mapping apps, soonest,” Lorme wrote. “I will assume responsibility. All locals understand what’s going on. It’s the (commercial vehicle) and (recreational vehicle) traffic that is creating hazardous conditions.”

CDOT is a “trusted partner” with multiple navigation app providers, allowing it to directly feed traffic information to these companies. But there’s nothing trustworthy about feeding false information to popular consumer apps. It seems if the DOT wanted to close a road or limit its traffic, it had plenty of options that didn’t involve delivering false information to drivers via map apps and the DOT’s own website.

Making this worse was the DOT’s decision to maintain the illusion of a road closure on consumer apps while updating its own site to reflect the actual facts.

Miller was successful in getting Google, Waze, Apple and TomTom to show Highway 82 as closed on Aug. 4. However, CDOT executive director Shoshana Lew insisted that evening that the agency keep Highway 82 marked as open on cotrip.org, the agency’s real-time road status app.

This doesn’t fix the problem. Drivers are more likely to rely on navigation apps than government websites when dealing with travel complications. Efforts like this diminish trust — both of the apps drivers use and the government that’s supposed to be serving them.

Just as worrying was these companies’ agreement to participate in the ruse. Communications obtained with public records requests appear to show Google and Apple knew they were being asked to plant false information in their map offerings.

The next morning, Miller wrote to his supervisor, CDOT chief engineer Stephen Harelson, to express his concerns. Miller said maintenance and operations personnel had directed him to contact Google, Waze and Apple the prior day to ask them to “show Independence Pass closed for traffic routing purposes for the entire month of August.”

“We are currently listed as a ‘trusted partner’ with these services and while they questioned this (request), I explained to them that CDOT is concerned about the traffic levels on the road and they need to be closed,” Miller wrote. “They did it but questioned why COTRIP showed Independence Pass as open.”

Google’s statement appears to indicate it’s willing to plant fake information if asked to do so by government agencies.

“When official changes are made to restrict certain routes, we update our directions accordingly.”

Apparently that includes showing a road is closed when it actually isn’t and listing a nonexistent hazard (mudslide) as the reason for the (fake) closure.

Obviously, nothing can really prevent government officials from straight up lying about road conditions to map app providers. But this fiasco involved not only the planting of false information by government officials, but the active participation of navigation app providers. This is a huge abuse of trust by all parties involved — something that could very well lead to drivers ignoring road closure warnings in the future and putting themselves in danger.

Filed Under: cdot, colorado, fake information, navigation, traffic, traffic routing, transportation
Companies: apple, google, tomtom, waze

Australian News Sites Shocked & Upset To Learn They Don't Need To Rely On Facebook For Traffic!

from the wait,-that's-possible?!? dept

I am still perplexed and confounded at how many people seem to think that Facebook is the one at fault for blocking links to news in Australia. Again, the law (that was about to be approved by the Australian Parliament despite Facebook warning them months ago that it would be forced to block news links if it went forward in its current form) would have been a disaster for the open web. And that’s even if you believe that Facebook itself has been a disaster for the open web. You can say that Facebook is the worst company in the world… and still recognize that this was the right move.

The law mandated that if Facebook had any links to news, then it had to negotiate a deal to pay certain news organizations (mainly Australia’s largest news organizations, where Rupert Murdoch is the dominant owner in a news industry that is one of the most consolidated in the world). If Facebook and Murdoch couldn’t reach an agreement, then they had to go to binding arbitration in which an arbitrator would simply tell Facebook how much it had to give Murdoch and other major media owners. Some have argued that this is not a tax, but… having the government step in to force a company to pay money for doing business is, by any normal definition, a tax. Though, this is actually worse than a tax, because it’s not putting the money into the hands of the government to be invested in public works. It’s going to one of the richest people in the world. For what? For failing to adapt to a changing market.

As we noted a few years ago, it’s truly stunning that Murdoch, who has spent much of his life going around the world preaching the gospel of “free market” and deregulation, completely changed his tune when he completely misunderstood the internet, and saw multiple internet investments disappear. So he turns around and demands that the companies who actually innovated simply have to give him money? That doesn’t sound like a free market. It sounds like welfare for a billionaire who’s upset he’s not even richer.

Even so, the most bizarre thing about last week’s story is how many Facebook haters who have insisted for years that Facebook “killed” the news business were absolutely apoplectic that Facebook was getting out of the news business entirely. You’d think they’d celebrate. Facebook can’t keep killing the journalism business if it’s not in that business any more.

The other bizarre reaction — which filled my Twitter feed to a point of ridiculousness for days — was the claim that Facebook was somehow “blocking important news” in Australia, including news about the pandemic and vaccines. Except… it wasn’t. No news was “blocked.” Just links to news on Facebook. All of these news organizations have websites. And many have apps. And they all still exist.

Indeed, the most amusing thing in all of this is that people in Australia are suddenly discovering that they don’t need Facebook for news. The Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) saw its own news app shoot to the top of the Apple App Store charts in Australia. Ironically, the original draft of this stupid law was so biased towards Murdoch that it originally excluded ABC from getting any money, and was only added later, after some folks pointed out how blatantly corrupt it was to leave them out and just funnel more money to Murdoch. But it’s not just ABC that has benefited. In a Reuters story, News Corp’s executive chairman in Australia, Michael Miller, admitted that direct traffic to their websites was way up as referrals from Facebook disappeared:

?Definitely referral traffic was nonexistent … while at the same time direct traffic to our websites was up in double digits,? he told the inquiry.

That… seems like a good thing? But, of course, this was never actually about helping news organizations like this. It was always about the cash transfers. Because immediately after Miller admits that direct traffic to their websites is way up, he demands that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) “scrutinize Facebook’s move.”

I mean… what the fuck is going on here?

Rather than having Facebook mitigate your traffic, which is what you’ve been complaining about for years, the company has exited the space, leading to a massive jump in direct traffic. The reaction here shows pretty clearly that the problem is not Facebook. The problem is that News Corp. and other Australian news organizations are too lazy to actually do anything with all of this direct interest. Facebook just dumped a direct connection to users right in these news organizations’ laps — removing Facebook as a middleman — and the news organizations’ response is… to blame Facebook and try to get the Competition authority to go after them. For what? Helping them? This whole thing is so bizarre.

The same Reuters report notes that traffic from Facebook to Australian news sites plummeted after the ban, as you’d expect. But, again, isn’t that what all the Facebook haters wanted in the first place? To get Facebook out of the news intermediary business?

It seems the truth is pretty self-evident: this was all a greed play. They just want Facebook’s money, but they don’t want to actually do the work to earn it.

Filed Under: australia, direct traffic, link tax, news tax, tax, traffic
Companies: abc, facebook, news corp

Canadian Publishing Group Says France Has The Right Idea, Presses For Its Own Google Tax

from the dividing-by-almost-zero dept

Canada is more than just a calmer, more apologetic version of the United States. It’s its own thing. But, more accurately, it’s a Britain + France thing. While Canada shares a common border with us, it’s still more Europe than US of A.

Every so often we’re reminded of its ties with the other side of the pond. This is one of those times.

French regulators recently decided Google owed French news sites for all the traffic it sends to them. It mandated “negotiations” between Google and French newspapers, but insisted the negotiations begin with Google getting out its wallet.

It appears Canadian lobbyists agree with France: Google owes them money.

A Canadian news industry advocacy group says that Canada would do well to follow France’s example in forcing internet search giant Google Inc. to pay news publishers for their content.

I guess this depends on how you define “do well.” This could backfire severely, resulting in no new revenue streams and fewer site visitors. Just ask Spain. That’s not “doing well.” If this means the group thinks it’s advisable to follow France’s example, it’s also wrong. But that’s the direction journalists are being steered by their advocates.

News Media Canada chief executive John Hinds said Thursday that the federal government will need to take a leadership role if the power dynamic between Google and publishers is to be changed.

This isn’t the first time Canadian journalists have demanded tech companies pay them for the traffic they send them. Three years ago, a Google tax was pitched to the Canadian government — one that included Facebook and Netflix in a proposal to tax companies who helped bring Canadian content to site users around the world.

Things are tough all over, thanks to a radical shift in, well… everything… since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Hinds somehow believes an advertising giant will provide for everyone during a time when everyone’s advertising revenues are down.

Hinds said the collapse of advertising rates in the face of the COVID-10 global pandemic, at a time when people are reading news sites at higher rates than ever, highlights the problem.

“I think it’s a fundamental thing: We need to be paid for our content. We need to be compensated,” Hinds said.

Fair enough. Let your readers do that. If they’re not interested, it’s really not up to a bunch of other companies located elsewhere in the world to make up the perceived difference. Everything sucks everywhere at the moment. Wringing a few bucks out of Google isn’t going to reverse anyone’s fortunes. And the more newspapers that convince governments Google should pay for sending them traffic, the less they’ll all be making individually.

A Google tax isn’t a revenue stream. It’s not even a trickle. Here’s Nate Hoffelder’s estimate of how Google’s “billions” in profit would actually pay out for rent-seeking newspapers:

Google is making under 4 cents per search, and turning a profit of around a half a cent per search.

Of course, that is an average across all of Google’s search results, and it includes search terms and even whole verticals which are not monetized (Google News, for example). And that is also a global average and not based on EU revenues, so it is not 100% applicable. (And those calculations are based on a bunch of unsupported assumptions.)

Leaving those caveats aside, the point that matters is that news publishers want Google to pay for the use of their links and snippets. This means that Google would need to take that 3.7 cents and divide it between all of the relevant links returned with each click of the search button (after taking a cut for itself).]

Efforts like this are counterproductive. They’re unlikely to reverse the fortunes of failing news concerns and far more likely to convince US tech companies to avoid providing specific services for certain countries. If Canadian publishers want what France has, they’re only going to end up splitting the disappointment.

Filed Under: aggregators, canada, france, google news, google tax, john hinds, news aggregators, news publishers, snippets, traffic
Companies: news media canada

Australia Gives Up Any Pretense: Pushes Straight Up Tax On Facebook & Google To Pay News Orgs

from the how-dare-you-send-us-traffic-without-paying dept

Last week we wrote about France’s push to force Google to pay legacy news organizations for the high crime of… sending them traffic. That was somewhat expected, as under the EU Copyright Directive, some version of this will show up in every EU country over the next few months (though France’s first approach is particularly dumb). Down in Australia, they’re not subject to the EU Copyright Directive, but it’s not stopping them from taking the same ridiculous approach:

Facebook and Google will be forced to share advertising revenue with Australian media companies after the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, instructed the competition watchdog to develop a mandatory code of conduct for the digital giants amid a steep decline in advertising brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

As the article notes, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had been working to get the media companies and Google and Facebook to come up with a voluntary plan, but since the media companies basically want it all, that hasn’t worked out so well. Instead, the ACCC has now been told to just write up the plan. Make no mistake about this: this is the Australian government, at the behest of a bunch of legacy media companies that failed to adapt to the internet, now taxing Google and Facebook for sending media companies free internet traffic that those companies don’t know how to monetize.

And it goes beyond just having to pay to send them traffic, it also requires Google and Facebook to let media companies know ahead of time if they’re going to make any changes to their algorithms that might impact content rankings. That is ridiculous. It’s basically giving news companies preferred placement in search rankings, and locking those legacy providers in. Why in the world should media companies get special access to the algorithm of either company?

Frydenberg said it was only fair that media companies that created the content got paid for it.

They do get paid for it. They decided to put content on the web. If they don’t like the traffic, they can easily use robots.txt to block sites from scraping them. If they can’t monetize the traffic, that’s on them, isn’t it?

?This will help to create a level playing field,? he said.

This is the exact opposite of a level playing field. This is basically tilting the playing field strongly towards legacy media companies in a manner that is not only silly for the internet companies, but in a manner that makes it nearly impossible for new entrants in the field, as the legacy players get an automatic boost from the free money they get from the internet companies that send them free traffic.

Filed Under: aggregation, australia, journalism, legacy, links, media, news, tax, traffic
Companies: facebook, google

French Government Says Google Must Pay French News Agencies For Sending Traffic Their Way

from the local-news-concerns-demand-the-right-to-fuck-themselves dept

European publishers just can’t punish themselves enough, apparently. News agencies experiencing downturns related to their inability to take advantage of the miraculous communications platform that is the internet are turning to their governments, demanding something be done about Google and its [checks notes] insistence on sending search traffic their way.

Building off the dubious assertion of “neighbouring rights,” the French government is now demanding Google pay French newspapers for the privilege of supplying them with additional readers.

In its latest crackdown on big tech, today the French Competition Authority has ordered Google to negotiate with French news organizations within the next three months to pay to reuse excerpts of news stories. That means Google will have to pay publishers for the headlines and snippets of stories that appear in Google News and even Google searches.

Note that it’s an “order to negotiate,” rather than the imposition of a tax. This is obviously in hopes of avoiding a repeat of Google’s response to the snippet tax imposed in Spain. When the Spanish government declared local news agencies had an “inalienable right” to be paid by Google for snippets and headlines showing up in Google searches, the company shut down its news service in Spain. This resulted in news agencies asking for the thing they had just asked for to be rolled back. Losing Google’s referral traffic obviously hurt them more than Google’s previous uncompensated “use” of their headlines and content snippets.

Of course, Google still has the nuclear option available, negotiation orders notwithstanding. A negotiation can open with Google offering to shut things down completely if French news agencies aren’t happy with the traffic Google’s sending them. And it’s a lot. The French Competition Authority knows this. And it knows its demands are placing a gun to news agencies’ heads, rather than Google’s. But it’s making these demands anyway.

These practices are made possible by the dominant position that Google is likely to hold in the market of general search services. This position leads Google to bring significant traffic to the websites of publishers and news agencies. Thus, according to the data provided by the complainants relating to 32 press titles, and not disputed by Google, the search engines — and therefore Google for a large part — represent, according to the sites, between 26% and 90% of the redirected traffic to their pages. This traffic is also very important and crucial for publishers and news agencies who cannot afford to lose any share of their digital readership due to their economic difficulties.

This is the Competition Authority stating that it thinks Google shouldn’t be able to pull the plug on local news services in response to snippet taxes. This condemnation of Google’s actions in Spain comes bundled with some inadvertent transparency about the importance of Google’s search engine to news agencies — the same ones who believe it’s Google that owes them money, rather than the other way around.

So, to avoid being nuked, the Competition Authority has laid down ground rules for “negotiations” that it hopes will keep Google from saying au revoir to its French Google News service.

Google must conduct negotiations within 3 months from the request to open negotiations from a press publisher or a news agency.

Neither the indexing, nor the classification, nor the presentation of the protected content taken up by Google on its services should in particular be affected by the negotiations.

Google will have to provide the Autorité with monthly reports on how it is complying with the decision.

But it won’t really be a negotiation. The Competition Authority says there’s only one acceptable outcome.

This injunction requires that the negotiations effectively result in a proposal for remuneration from Google.

This is dumb and highly unlikely to result in anything that makes French news agencies happy. They may be able to wrestle some money out of the company currently sending them traffic for free, but it’s not going to turn their fortunes around. Nor is it likely to result in more traffic being sent their way.

Filed Under: aggregation, copyright directive, eu copyright directive, france, google news, google tax, neighboring rights, traffic
Companies: google

Techdirt Podcast Episode 155: Lies, Damned Lies & Audience Metrics

from the traffic-is-fake dept

In 2016, mostly out of frustration, I wrote a post about how traffic is fake, audience numbers are garbage, and nobody knows how many people see anything. My feelings haven’t changed much, and neither has the digital advertising ecosystem. And since regular podcast co-host Dennis Yang runs a digital metrics company, it only made sense for us to hash it out on an episode all about audience measurement and how it shapes online advertising.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: advertising, metrics, podcast, publishing, traffic