Campbell Brown, Facebook’s top news executive, left the company this month. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram’s Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not spread news.
Even Google — the strongest partner of news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less reliable, prompting publishers to rely more on the search giant. The company has laid off news staff as part of two recent team shakeups, and some publishers say traffic from Google has declined.
If it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now: the major online platforms are putting an end to news.
Some executives at the biggest tech companies, like Instagram’s Adam Mosseri, have stated unequivocally that hosting news on their sites can often be more trouble than it’s worth because it creates polarized debates. Others, like Elon Musk, the owner of X, have expressed their disdain for the mainstream press. Publishers appear to have resigned themselves to the idea that traffic from big tech companies won’t return to what it once was.
Even in the long-tense relationship between publishers and technology platforms, the latest rift is striking – and the consequences for the news industry are serious.
Many news companies have struggled to survive after tech companies upended the industry’s business model more than a decade ago. A lifeline was the traffic – and therefore advertising – that came from sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Now the traffic is disappearing. According to Similarweb, a data and analytics company, top news sites received about 11.5 percent of their U.S. web traffic from social networks in September 2020. By September this year it had fallen to 6.5 percent.
“The disruption to an already difficult business model is real,” Adrienne LaFrance, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, said in an interview. Ms. LaFrance noted that while social traffic has always experienced booms and busts, the decline in the last 12 to 18 months has been more severe than most publishers expected.
“This is a post-social web,” she added.
A spokeswoman for Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, declined to comment. Elon Musk and a spokesman for Linda Yaccarino, X’s chief executive, did not respond to a request for comment.
Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s vice president of global news partnerships, said in a statement that the company continues to prioritize “sending valuable traffic to publishers and supporting a healthy, open web.”
It didn’t start out that way. During the rise of the consumer internet about 20 years ago, companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter embraced journalism and articles from traditional media companies appeared on their platforms.
“Every internet platform has a responsibility to try to help fund and form partnerships to support news,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, said in an interview with News Corp’s chief executive several years ago when Zuckerberg said nor tried court publishers.
Both Facebook and Twitter toyed with initiatives to support news on their platforms. For example, in 2019, Facebook introduced Facebook News, a tab where readers can find coverage from paid partner publications. Twitter also experimented with partnerships, joining forces with The Associated Press and Portal in 2021 to combat misinformation.
But these efforts were short-lived. Facebook News is no more, and Ms. Brown, the leader of the news effort, has announced her resignation. Since Mr. Musk bought Twitter nearly a year ago, he has made changes that de-emphasized traditional media on the site, including eliminating article headlines in posts and removing the “verified” blue check mark on journalists and Public figures who did not pay for it. Platforms like TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram generate negligible traffic numbers for media companies.
The sharp decline in referral traffic from social media platforms over the past two years has affected all news publishers, including The New York Times.
According to a recording of a September staff meeting obtained by The Times, The Wall Street Journal noted a decline that began about 18 months ago. “For much of our distribution, we are at the mercy of social algorithms and tech giants,” Emma Tucker, editor-in-chief of the Journal, told the newsroom at the meeting.
Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of Semafor and a former Times media columnist, said web traffic is no longer “the benchmark for digital media.” He said intermediary platforms such as SmartNews, Apple News and Flipboard are becoming increasingly important to publishers as readers look for a combination of serious journalism and the option of multiple sources.
“People like having lots of sources of information, but they don’t want to snoop around a post-apocalyptic wasteland to find it,” Mr. Smith said.
With Meta and X no longer reliable, publishers are increasingly reliant on Google. For more than two decades, publishers large and small have been packaging their content to rank high in Google search results. This practice is called search engine optimization. These in-depth efforts include creating secondary headlines designed to mimic likely search queries from Google users, populating articles with links to other sites, and mentoring teams to drive traffic and stay on top of search engine changes.
Google says it sends 24 billion clicks a month, or 9,000 per second, to news publishers’ websites through its search engine and associated news site.
While the Los Angeles Times gets a slightly larger share of traffic from online searches (50 to 60 percent, up from 30 to 40 percent), it can’t make up for losses from social media, said Samantha Melbourneweaver, deputy managing editor for audiences.
But even Google is wobbling. Some publishers have seen a decline in Google referral traffic in recent weeks, said two people from several major media sites. Although Google remains by far the most important source of referral traffic for publishers, these people are concerned that the decline is a sign of things to come.
“It’s volatile,” Ms Melbourneweaver said. “Google exists for Google’s needs, not ours.”
Google laid off some members of its news partnership team in September and laid off up to 45 employees from its Google News team this week, the Alphabet Workers Union said. (The Information, a tech news site, previously reported on the layoffs at Google News.)
“We have made some internal changes to streamline our organization,” Jenn Crider, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement.
The News Partnership team was created to secure agreements with publishers and partnerships. Over time, it introduced programs to train newsrooms, support news product development and respond to governments around the world that have pushed Google to share more revenue with news organizations.
Mr. Zaidi wrote in an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times that the team would introduce more artificial intelligence. “We had to make some difficult decisions to better prepare our team for what lies ahead,” he wrote.
Google has been making an AI push all year, releasing an AI chatbot called Bard in March and offering some users a version of its search engine in May that can generate explanations, poetry and prose on top of traditional web results. News organizations have expressed concerns that these AI systems, which can answer users’ questions without them clicking a link, could one day hurt traffic to their websites.
A number of publishers have spoken privately about what the future of post-Google traffic might look like and how to better prepare as Google’s AI products become more popular and further bury links to news publications.
Ms. LaFrance said The Atlantic would push branded newsletters, its homepage and its print magazine. At the end of June, The Atlantic had more than 925,000 paid subscribers to its print and digital products, a 10 percent increase from a year ago, the company said.
“Direct connections with your readership are obviously important,” Ms. LaFrance said. “We as people and readers shouldn’t just use three all-powerful, attention-consuming mega-platforms to become curious and informed.”
She added: “In some ways, this decline of the social web is extraordinarily liberating.”