So today this happened.
“Unfortunately, in response to Australia’s proposed News Media Bargaining Code legislation, Facebook will have to restrict publishers and people in Australia from sharing or viewing Australian and international news content on Facebook.”
The reality for news organisations, large and small, is that their legacy news models and the habits of news consumers have changed. For us, a small regional news producer, over 30% of traffic to our website comes from Facebook.
Facebook is vital to be present among other news organisations and to direct traffic to our website. The habits of watching the evening news, buying a daily paper, going to a news homepage are dwindling habits of old.
Traffic pushed to news resources from Facebook is how many people get their news. Today’s move by Facebook to turnoff news pages without notice damages the smaller regional news organisations with flow on effects for many local small businesses.
It’s a double blow because the new media bargaining code will see little to none of the money paid by Google (at this stage) filter down to the small regional players the government insists it was designed to help.
The big get bigger and small get washed away.