honestly, i think that the whole situation was ridiculous to begin with. i'm as much for regulation as the next gal (probably even more so than most people on HN judging by the comments i've read in the last few weeks since i started visiting on the regular) but in this case the government was just trying to offload it's own responsibility to the tech giants instead of actually supporting local news services
I don’t think the underlying reason has anything to do with the government pressure or local news.
I think this has everything to do with a very powerful media company, let’s call them News Corp, successfully lobbying for a new income stream propping up falling numbers and the lobbying not being to hard to do with open corruption in AU government.
When Google/Facebook had the temporary news publishing ban, a variety of smaller news sources surfaced with a broader spectrum of content and opinions.
When an agreement was made, visiting Google News was a wall of News Corp trash content and the smaller news providers had gone.
It seems to be a common problem everywhere though. News services all over the world are increasingly paywalling their content. There's discussions about AI scraping it for free.
The approach Australia took was somewhat unique though other countries proposed it too. But the problem does exist everywhere.
I don't think paywalls are the solution either though. I'm not going to sign up for a subscription if I find an article linked on HN and can't read it. That's just nuts. Who invests in a whole news platform because of one or a handful of articles?
I think paywalls are completely fine. It's the most normal business model there is. I want to read a newspaper, I buy a copy. That's literally how it has worked hundreds of years. Most sites let you peek or give you X articles for free, that's basically the equivalent of opening a paper and taking a look before buying it.
Sure if someone links to something that's behind a paywall and I don't have access I can't participate, but that's just normal. If I'm not willing to buy a book or a movie or a netflix subscription I can't participate in a discussion about it. Probably means it wasn't valuable enough for me. Money is a good and transparent indicator of what's worth your time.
Technically I think news sites would stand to benefit from making micro-transactions much easier, so that I can just shoot them 50 cents with a single click but that's about the only issue with it.
Let's say, I share a link to a website that wants to get paid on my Facebook.
Meta won't crawl it, since they don't want to pay. So, the link will show up, but without a preview. Any one who clicks on the link will visit the website first, potentially removing them from Facebook for a little while. Alternatively, Meta may decide the demote links without previews. Both of these scenarios reduce active users, and time spent by users on the website. Fewer engagement minutes means fewer opportunities to show them ads.
On the other hand, those users will end up seeing more ads on the news website.
Or Meta can simply stop parsing such links and not even show a hyperlink. If users want to visit the link, they have to copy it manually and paste it in address bar. Funny thing, many users don't even know they can paste links in address bar. They use Google as address bar. I have seen people type the whole domain name including the TLD in Google to get to websites. Now imagine Google also stops redirecting to such links that demand payment for sending them traffic.
The mainstream media are angry that modern AdTech (Google, Facebook) has taken most of the advertising revenue that used to be their main source of income. They often consider Facebook and Google to be their main competitors, even more so than other media companies.
But seriously, why don't they just drop their opengraph tags, if they don't want to show their headlines/subheadings for free? It's not like they are being forced to add these to their pages, so they should not be charging for it.
> But seriously, why don't they just drop their opengraph tags, if they don't want to show their headlines/subheadings for free? It's not like they are being forced to add these to their pages, so they should not be charging for it.
They know why, because most of their traffic comes from these platforms. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
Yeah I think this was ridiculous, the news sites get money from being unreadable due to advertising, Meta, Twitter etc drive new people to those pages.
Readit News
Meta won't renew commercial deals with Australian news media
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-01/meta-won-t-renew-deal...
I think this has everything to do with a very powerful media company, let’s call them News Corp, successfully lobbying for a new income stream propping up falling numbers and the lobbying not being to hard to do with open corruption in AU government.
When Google/Facebook had the temporary news publishing ban, a variety of smaller news sources surfaced with a broader spectrum of content and opinions.
When an agreement was made, visiting Google News was a wall of News Corp trash content and the smaller news providers had gone.
The approach Australia took was somewhat unique though other countries proposed it too. But the problem does exist everywhere.
I don't think paywalls are the solution either though. I'm not going to sign up for a subscription if I find an article linked on HN and can't read it. That's just nuts. Who invests in a whole news platform because of one or a handful of articles?
Sure if someone links to something that's behind a paywall and I don't have access I can't participate, but that's just normal. If I'm not willing to buy a book or a movie or a netflix subscription I can't participate in a discussion about it. Probably means it wasn't valuable enough for me. Money is a good and transparent indicator of what's worth your time.
Technically I think news sites would stand to benefit from making micro-transactions much easier, so that I can just shoot them 50 cents with a single click but that's about the only issue with it.
Who would be hurt the most?
On the other hand, those users will end up seeing more ads on the news website.
But seriously, why don't they just drop their opengraph tags, if they don't want to show their headlines/subheadings for free? It's not like they are being forced to add these to their pages, so they should not be charging for it.
They know why, because most of their traffic comes from these platforms. They want to have their cake and eat it too.
Its a dying medium that deserves to die IMO