Future of newspapers in times of social media
Facebook to pay French newspapers for their content
I know, I know, another piece of news about Facebook out there on Medium. But this time it is not about skeletons in the closet or Facebook's impact on the teenager's self-esteem. This time I would like to speak about how Facebook will approach media. For a while, now, Facebook has been out there not only for texting and community purposes but has also become a large news sharing platform. Yet this time they finally have to pay for the high quality and not-fake-news content. And as I am interested in the media and press, I would like to tackle this today.
Why “finally“ — have some sympathy, Ksenia? — you would say. Well, let us start a bit further away. As a matter of fact, over the past years, Facebook became synonymous with the word “Internet”. On one side, we can argue that, saying that one social media corporation is still too ambitious to be called “The World Wide Web”. On the other side, we can simply list all the companies which belong to Facebook — like Facebook itself and its Messenger app, WhatsApp, Instagram, and many others. The estimated number of Facebook-owned users is around 3.51 billion active users worldwide (according to the articles here or here). This makes 45% of the whole population! Impressive, is not it? In other words, yes, the good half of the Internet is indeed owned by Facebook.
Additionally, let’s not forget the recent down break of all social media platforms, and what resonance this created. This outrage was called “a big infrastructure collapse” by Sarah Aoun, the VP for Security at Open Tech Fund, showing how technical issues of one large corporation have shaken all our communication that day, forcing people to download new messaging apps or to go on Twitter (and not to panic!).
But I think I got a bit carried away, so let’s get back to our elephant in the room. What does Facebook have to do with the news? Why would they pay for it? And is this actually good news?
Having such a large base of active users, it would be actually interesting to see what they do on social media alone (on Facebook). If we have a look into the main purposes, why users go to the app in the US, we would find the following reasons:
As you can see, among staying in touch with friends & entertainment, reading the news is named among the top 3 reasons to open your Facebook app. With a little math (and the assumption that this chart is valid not only for US users), we will land to the number 0.67 billion users worldwide, who scroll their Facebook feed seeking a daily portion of news. I guess now you can relate a bit better, why the press was not entirely happy when their content was reaching such audiences without any return. Content creators did not receive a single penny, either from the Facebook user or the social media itself until now.
But here comes France in the game, which above other European countries, has a reputation for battling for its rights, and this time it was no different. France became a pioneering EU country, which in 2019 has enacted the directive on the publishing rights of the news publishing companies. This directive became a starting point for the large technology companies to enter a dialogue with the news publishers and media companies about the monetary rewards for their content. Over the past 2 years, France was discussing the publishing rights and the remuneration of the articles for the news agencies, newspapers by the search engines and social networks, and now this finally is kicking off.
Here finally comes the news. A couple of days ago, on 21 October, Facebook Inc. has reached an agreement with the French press alliance APIG (representing leading daily newspapers such as Le Monde, Le Figaro and Les Echos). Under this agreement, starting from January 2022 Facebook would have to pay to the national and regional French newspapers for their content, once shared on the social network. Yet there is no disclosure on the financial terms of this agreement, writes Bloomberg.
This regulation has also affected the brother of Facebook in this technology world — Google. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has already received a 500 million-euro fine from France’s authorities, as Google failed to find a compromise and reach an agreement with the media companies. Yet, Google learnt the lesson quickly and was a bit more reactive than Facebook when it comes to the timing — the agreement between Google & French authorities was found already in January this year. Play big or go home — so Google paid the full fine and plays big, and keeps publishing in the French press.
This news is not entirely new, the similar discussions and measures have been ongoing in Australia earlier this year. These measures taken in Australia also strongly impacted both Facebook and Google (more on the topic here). At the end of February this year, Australia released the law which obliges technology corporates like Google and Facebook to pay a negotiated fee to use the news content from the news agency. Both France and Australia remain pioneers in the field of publishing rights, and will hopefully also become trendsetters for the other countries.
Final thoughts
The question remains still open, whether such measures would really make the change and support the local newspapers and promote journalism. Here I see several possible scenarios. One possible scenario is that more and more countries will pick up this initiative and will defend the rights of their publishers. In such a case, these technology monsters like Facebook and Google would either have to be responsive and lean into the new regulations, or on the other side be proactive, and develop a business model supporting paying journalists or news agencies for their content (like Medium). Alternatively, I see Facebook & Google slowly existing in these markets, but I do not believe in such development, and I see it rather as a negotiation technique (they tried this already with both France & Australia, after all). The last scenario, which I also consider quite realistic, is that Facebook & Google will expand their companies to create their own news publishing platform, with their very own employed content creators. Facebook Newsroom, or The Daily Google, could be our new morning read with the coffee…
