Are Facebook and Google Stealing Content and Revenue from News Sites?

Should they be forced to pay for that content?

There has been more and more agitation by media companies, such as Postmedia here in Canada, with claims that Facebook and Google “reproduce” their content and make advertising revenue from it, and that they should be forced to pay for that use. The current Canadian government seems poised to pass such legislation, likely modelled after that which Australia has already passed.

To the best I can determine, neither reproduce any content. In all cases that I can find, they show headlines, possibly a sentence or so, and to see more you must click the link provided. Links are always labelled with the source of the content, and that link takes you to that source; whether that be the New York Times, the BBC, or wherever they are quoting from. Here’s an example from news.google.com:

There is simply nowhere on any Google site to read an entire news article without actually going to the source and reading it there. For example, clicking the top link in the above image would take the reader directly to toronto.ctvnews.ca.

If you can find any exception, where Google reproduces news articles in full without requiring one to click through in order to read it, feel free to provide an example in comments.

In the case of Facebook, I’m not aware they even have a news site at all, although they have a journalism project where they attempt to work with content publishers. However what you will find on Facebook are pages created by various news organizations themselves such as this one for CTV News:

And what is in the timeline for this site? All the current news articles CTV has made available, usually with an image, and as with the Google news links, clicking any of them takes you to the CTV news site. In this case, if full articles were reproduced on such Facebook pages, Facebook would not be responsible, it is the media companies, in this example CTV News, who are posting it. So how can they then claim Facebook is “stealing” anything, either content or revenue?

Moreover, on both the Google and Facebook pages I cut the above images from, nowhere do I see a single advertisement. [Edit:] Advertisements do appear on your own Facebook timelines, as do they in Google search as “sponsored” results.

But let’s assume both platforms are indeed making revenue every time someone clicks one of these links. Would that be wrong?

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far away…

Sticking with CTV for the moment, though this applies to every broadcaster and every news publisher such as the New York Times or the Toronto Sun, their potential customer reach before the Internet was quite local. CTV is a Toronto television station and outside a roughly 100 mile radius you would not be able to view it. Newspapers generally also only served a certain radius of their base, though of course copies could be mailed and the more famous broadsheets did (and still do) extend their reach that way.

Still before the internet, cable TV services came about and TV broadcasters were able to extend their reach to far more customers. Yet I recall there were arguments then too about whether those evil cable companies should be allowed to carry their signals without paying the broadcasters for them. So this argument is hardly new. One fly in the ointment then is that, since broadcasters could reach more customers, it only makes sense they could attract more advertisers and/or higher ad rates. So why would they not want cable companies to carry them? It wasn’t long before things reversed, where if a cable company omitted some broadcaster, the broadcaster would complain about that too, since of course their competition (all other broadcasters) were being carried. Hmmm.

The internet as we know it has now been around for more than a quarter century. Pretty early on newspapers realized they could create a presence there and at very little cost they were suddenly exposed to the entire world. Once technology and bandwidth improved sufficiently, broadcasters followed, discovering they could deliver their product directly to your computer monitor as well.

There is a catch though. As more and more began consuming content over the internet, it was quite predictable that there would be less attraction for printed copies of newspapers, and therefore less potential revenue from advertisers. With the many subscription services such as Netflix, the same is happening to broadcasters.

Damn internet!

Of course the proper response was to monetize their web offerings, which all certainly now do (or at least can if they choose). However, due to the nature of the internet, there is literally no limit to how much competition there can be for advertising dollars. Journalism and opinion are no longer the exclusive preserve of newspaper companies, nor is providing video content the exclusive preserve of original TV broadcasters. As a result, advertisers have a very wide and continually growing choice of where to advertise. But advertising budgets will always have limits and so the the amount that might be paid to any one content provider has no doubt dropped over time and will probably continue to do so.

Damn internet!

There is one rather important factor that seems to keep getting omitted from the issue - one that content providers seem to not want to acknowledge. Every time a consumer clicks on any link, whether via Google News, Google search results, Facebook pages, etc, that consumer is being delivered to the content provider’s own web site where that consumer will see and may click on any ad displayed there. These services are driving potential revenue to the content providers!

So while perhaps overall revenue may be dropping, if anything, Google, Facebook, and others are helping to ameliorate this, not cause it. In other words they are in fact providing a service to content providers. This is what media companies are claiming they should be paid for! What? Seems to me they should be paying Google and Facebook some fraction of the revenue they otherwise would not have gained! Why is it wrong for these platforms to collect some revenue in return for providing this service?

If they think they are losing revenue now, wait until these services begin to block all links to them - no longer will I be able to post a link to a news article on my Facebook feed that you can click on and read.

In Australia this is already in action, Facebook and Google are choosing to not allow links to providers at all instead of allowing themselves to get fleeced by them.

Let’s see how long before the providers begin to complain to government that the platforms are somehow not “playing fair” by blocking them - that is, by not submitting to the extortion this actually is.