Canadian media are urged not to hold their breath. The Online News Act could just be a waste of time. Elsewhere in the world, traffic redirected by Internet giants to news sites or applications is plummeting. Reversing the trend will not be easy… but not impossible either.
In any case, the problem is widespread. In a word: social networks and search engines are redirecting fewer and fewer people to major media sites, whether written or electronic. In any case, this is what statistics on this subject recently released by Danish analyst and digital media expert Thomas Baekdal indicate.
According to its data, in August 2023, compared to August 2020, four to six times fewer users of Facebook and Twitter – now renamed X – clicked on a link that redirected them to a news site. It is enormous !
“Social media executives tell us that news is ‘just not worth it,’ so they change their algorithms to minimize it in favor of other types of media content that audiences spend more time on.” , analyzes Thomas Baekdal.
Pandemic fatigue?
On so many levels, 2020 was, well, special. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many things were anything but normal. The media took advantage of this to exceptionally expand their readership, their audience. Can we assume that the drop in interest in their content noted on social networks in the following three years is the effect of “pandemic fatigue”, and that a possible rebound is inevitable?
Everything is possible. Thomas Baekdal carried out a second analysis, on Google’s side this time, focusing on the number of visits received by information sites over the past 20 years and which come from the Google search engine. This is not encouraging.
His observation: while Google redirected year after year in most countries of Europe and North America approximately the same proportion of Internet users to online news between 2004 and 2016, since that year, this proportion suffers a general decline, except when an event of major interest occurs in the news.
The analyst endorses the conclusion of a survey on the same subject and published in the United States last June by the Reuters Institute. The institute, a reference on the question of the role of the media in the American public sphere, believes that the public is generally less interested in current affairs than before. “Less than half (48%) of the people surveyed today say they are very or extremely interested in the news, down from 63% in 2017,” the American organization indicated a year ago. .
In other words, if there is public fatigue with news content, the figures drawn from Google, Facebook and elsewhere on the Internet tend to indicate that it is not just pandemic. This is a problem that has existed for longer than the last three years, and which goes beyond search engines and social networks, says the Danish analyst.
A bold statement, coming from an expert analyst in the digital transition. Because the first thing that digital transition experts generally tell their clients or their bosses is to satisfy first and foremost… search engines and social networks.
Sheltered from platforms
Comply above all with the requirements of Google and Facebook is what most companies encouraged to make a digital shift have been told in Quebec over the last fifteen years. This is also an argument put forward by the government in 2020, when investing in the launch of the Blue Basket: it will allow Quebec merchants to strengthen their SEO.
Their what?
This is the cornerstone of a successful online strategy. It’s quite simple: for it to work, a website must attract Internet users. And since most people browse the Internet from Google or Facebook, the best way to attract Internet users to your site is to optimize your content so that it is better showcased by these platforms.
Optimizing your content to appeal to Google is what we call good SEO.
Ironically, Facebook, the other Web giant cited by Ottawa in its Online News Act as taking unfair advantage of content produced by news sites, owes a good part of its commercial success to the opposite strategy: it has since prevented its Google debut to be able to access its web pages.
It’s no coincidence that you almost never find links to Facebook in the results of a Google search. Since its beginnings, Facebook has protected its most valuable asset: its content. Netflix as well as Apple and Disney also protect their content very jealously.
Making your product exclusive is a marketing strategy that has been successful for many big brands over the years. There is no reason why it should be any different in the media and information industry.