from the can-you-have-a-link-tax-without-links? dept
As everyone continues to demand that social media companies pay news orgs for the crime of sending them traffic, it’s becoming clear that fewer and fewer people are using social media for news any more, and social media sites simply are not a major driver of traffic to news orgs anyway.
The PressGazette has had a series of stories lately highlighting how social media is increasingly less relevant in driving traffic to media orgs. After looking at where traffic to media orgs is coming from, the PressGazette finds that, in basically every case, social media is sending less and less traffic to media sites. And that’s especially true for the social media sites most commonly associated with news.
The PressGazette notes that traffic has plummeted from Facebook to media orgs:
And that’s equally true of Twitter referral traffic:
And while this decline clearly predates Elon Musk, it is notable that he still insists that Twitter is an important site for the media. That appears to not really be true based on the data in these articles.
But, still, the larger point is that the whole concept being pushed in these link tax bills, such as the CJPA here in California, is that social media companies are somehow unfairly stealing revenue from news orgs. When, from what we can see, it looks like social media companies don’t much care about news. It’s not driving much usage at all.
It’s possible this is why the media orgs are so desperate for these corrupt link tax government handouts, but it really suggests that the reasoning behind them, that social media is unfairly “profiting” from news, is simply not supported by the data at all.
Filed Under: cjpa, link tax, referral traffic, social media
Companies: facebook, meta, twitter
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