By Greg Vega In many countries, they have begun to reconsider the relationship of states against the enormous power of what we call social networks.
The most recent example is Australia, where the first victim in the line between government and Internet companies: the media. I will summarize this matter based on the text of Joshua Benton in Neyman Lab, Site of the Harvard Neyman Foundation.
Australian regulators want to force Facebook to pay the media. The problem is that the content of these media outlets is based on a concise concept of “value” posted on Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg’s company did not hit around Bush, declaring that “Facebook will restrict publishers and the public in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content in response to Australia’s proposed new ‘Media Trade Act’.”
As they did this week, traffic for the Australian media fell. Benton asked Chartbeat, a leading website traffic surveyor, to give the first preliminary diagnosis.
They told him: “Unfortunately, Facebook’s demise has had an impact on publishers’ traffic statistics – while Facebook traffic has declined, overall Australian traffic has not shifted to other sites.
“This drop is most dramatically reflected in traffic to Australian sites from readers outside Australia: this traffic outside Australia has dropped by more than 20 per cent day by day (which seems to have dropped a little more in the last few hours).
“We are also seeing a huge drop in reader traffic within Australia: ET (just before making the Facebook switch) at 1pm on Wednesday, with more than 15 per cent of visits from Australia driven by Facebook. Traffic from there has been steadily declining, with less than 5 percent of visits by 8pm driven by Facebook. “
Low visits mean low revenue for the media, which charges a fee every time a viewer sees an ad, which is why many people around the world base their strategies on its advertising on networks. Let’s see how this war ends. For now, regulators, governments, users and the media need to pay attention.
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