The business model that has helped newspapers survive and develop for a long time is mainly advertising. In the context of increasingly difficult print newspapers, television and radio have also passed their glory days, especially in the past 10 years, when communication technology has become more modern with cheaper costs, most online newspapers also focus on advertising revenue with the hope that the "goose" will "lay golden eggs". When social networks develop rapidly along with the concept of "distributed content", press agencies realize that social networks can play an important role in spreading information, bringing huge traffic. And of course, the hope is that advertising revenue will gradually increase - first display advertising, then automated advertising and sponsored content.
Press agencies compete to get high traffic, especially traffic from external sources that depend on the algorithms of search engines and social networks, which not only reduces the quality of journalism, but also places too many advertisements on the page and in the article, which also brings a bad experience to readers. When asked about this question by some press agency leaders, they clicked their tongues: "There is no other way because we need to have a source of income."
However, at this point, it is clear that online newspapers relying on advertising and social networks will not be able to develop sustainably, and may even suffer serious consequences to the point of bankruptcy.
Friend or foe?
About 10 years ago, there was a debate at many press conferences and seminars as well as in newsrooms around the world about whether social networks should be considered friends or enemies. It was called "enemies" because social networks at that time "robbed" many readers and sources of revenue from press agencies, and it was called "friends" because thanks to social networks, news websites attracted a significant amount of traffic.
Of course, everyone expects that high and growing traffic will mean increased advertising revenue, offsetting the decline in print advertising and circulation revenue.
Ultimately, newsroom leaders came to the view that social media was both a friend and a foe, a term they coined in English as “frenemy,” a portmanteau of “friend” and “enemy.” Social media—which at the time were primarily Facebook and Twitter—carried many threats to newsrooms, but also brought many benefits, so a strategy for leveraging social media became an integral part of newsroom operations.
The concept of "social journalism" has even emerged - that is, press agencies use social networks in every stage of the content production process: from information collection, information verification, information supplementation to information release.
Many newsrooms are so innovative that when they have breaking news, they post it on their Facebook fanpage or Twitter account first, then make the news on their news page.
Over time, the relationship between newspapers and social media and search engines like Google has not been smooth.
The fears and excitement of the past have now given way to constant clashes, and collaborative projects between technology platforms and the press have given way to harsh statements and threats from both sides.
However, the disadvantage seems to be on the side of the press agencies. The money is not much, not even visible, and the traffic is down miserably.
Over time, the relationship between newspapers and social media and search engines like Google has been rocky. Collaborative projects between technology platforms and newspapers have given way to harsh statements and threats from both sides. However, the odds seem to be stacked against the media.
According to the latest surveys, traffic from Facebook to news agencies’ news sites has plummeted, while Meta – the social network’s parent company – continues its policy of distancing itself from the press. Data from reputable analytics firms Chartbeat and Similarweb in May confirmed the increasingly clear downward trend.
Of the 1,350 global news organizations for which Chartbeat has data, 27% of traffic from external sources, search engines, and social media in January 2018 came from Facebook, equivalent to 2 billion pages. By April 2023, that share had dropped to 11% (equivalent to 1.5 billion).
Although all media outlets are affected, the worst affected are small-scale newspapers. A survey of 486 small media outlets (with an average daily traffic of less than 10,000 pages), traffic from Facebook in April accounted for only 2%.
For large press agencies (with an average of over 100,000 pages/day), the decrease was 24%, while for medium-sized newspapers (from 10,000 to 100,000 pages/day), the decrease was up to 46%.
Percentage of Facebook traffic in total visits from external sources/search engines/social networks of 1,350 press agencies from January 2018 to April 2024:
Earlier, Britain's largest newspaper group Reach said its digital advertising revenue in the first four months of 2023 had fallen by 14.5%, and it attributed the decline in traffic to "recent changes to the way news is displayed on Facebook".
Chartbeat data tracking 1,350 news sites also shows that traffic from Twitter, which was already small, accounted for just 1.9% of total traffic in April 2018 and dropped to 1.2% five years later, as of April this year.
A closer look shows that small news organizations now have virtually no traffic from Twitter. There were just 186,930 page views in April for 486 small newsrooms (under 10,000 pages/day), down 98% from 10.1 million pages in April 2018.
The Covid-19 pandemic has devastated traffic to small news outlets. Even well-known news outlets have not been spared.
Among the 25 English-language news sites surveyed, the average decline over the two years from April 2021 to April 2023 was 30%.
Traffic from Facebook by scale of 1,350 press agencies from January 2018 to April 2023 (taking January 2018 as the benchmark = 100%):
Facebook and the Fall of Buzzfeed News
Buzzfeed News' shutdown in April this year showed the risks of news organizations focusing too much on their strategies to attract traffic from social media platforms.
Although Similarweb's social traffic data only counts desktop views, which are a relatively small percentage of a site's overall traffic, the downward trend is clear.
In just two years, visits to Buzzfeed News from Facebook dropped from 261,669 in April 2021 to 124,825 in March of this year, a decrease of 110%.
Buzzfeed.com saw a similar decline, down 70% year-over-year. It’s worth noting that traffic from other social networks also dropped, but Facebook’s decline was the largest. In April 2020, Facebook desktop traffic accounted for 76% of Buzzfeed’s social network traffic. That figure dropped to 34% in March 2023.
Visits to BuzzFeed.com from Facebook and other social networks on computers, worldwide, April 2020–March 2023:
Facebook's diminishing role also affects the overall readership of news organizations that rely on social media.
According to Similarweb, Buzzfeed.com had 152.6 million visits two years ago, compared to less than 100 million in recent months. The news outlet attributed the drop in time spent viewing its content to Facebook’s changes.
Recent changes to Facebook's algorithm and the platform's de-prioritization of news have had a strong impact on news organizations.
A 2014 algorithm change to reduce clickbait hit viral-focused news sites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed hard, and a 2018 addition to prioritize content from “family and friends” in the News Feed was another huge blow to news organizations.
In 2022, Facebook announced it would be retiring Instant Articles, which made news access faster in a friendly format right in Facebook's mobile app.
Facebook’s diminishing role has also affected the overall readership of news organizations that rely on social media. Changes to Facebook’s algorithm and the platform’s de-prioritization of news have had a major impact on news organizations.
In April 2023, Facebook's parent company Meta released a report that stated news plays "a small and diminishing role" on its platform.
The report – released shortly after the UK introduced a new law that will force Meta and Google to pay news publishers for using news content – found that news links make up just 3% of what Facebook users around the world see in their News Feed.
The report's authors also offered a "rough estimate" that news organizations on average earn only 1% to 1.5% of their total revenue from links back to their websites from content shared on Facebook.
Previously, at the end of 2022, Meta laid off a series of key personnel related to the news sector, an indication that the technology corporation was ready to say goodbye to journalism.
Among the senior staffers to leave are David Grant, who heads the Meta Journalism Project, and Dorrine Mendoza, who heads local news partnerships.
Among other press-related positions that were also fired were the head of news partnerships for Southeast Asia, a news programming director, two news integration directors and several others.
Similarweb data for 28 major news organizations also shows that traffic from Facebook to both print and online newspaper websites has dropped sharply.
Vice Group's popular lifestyle and young women's site Refinery 29 suffered the biggest drop, down 92% between April 2021 and March 2023. Reach's sites express.co.uk and manchestereveningnews.co.uk followed, down 87%.
In April 2020, 95% of Ladbible’s desktop social media traffic came from Facebook, compared to 49% in March this year. Visits to sun.co.uk have also fallen from 75% to 25% over the same period. For the Daily Mail, the drop was from 59% to 19%, but they have gained traffic from Twitter and YouTube.
Let's take a look at two famous newsrooms, once pioneers of innovation in journalism, but now one has had to close down, the other declared bankruptcy - a not-so-bright sign for the future of digital journalism.
Buzzfeed News: Even the brightest stars must die out
Buzzfeed News, the one-time shining star of digital journalism, has announced it is permanently shutting down its Pulitzer Prize-winning news division and laying off about 60 reporters, a move that founder and editor-in-chief Ben Smith described as "the end of the marriage between news and social media."
Anyone who studies modern journalism will surely know this once-famous name. Buzzfeed was once the "unrivaled champion" of viral news (spreading on social networks), leading the genre of articles called "listicles" which were once considered a new innovation of journalism (like "5 ways to help women in their 40s stay in shape" or "10 places to travel this summer", etc.), and also violent, provocative and shocking content to attract views. But they still could not escape financial difficulties.
"I decided to invest so much in BuzzFeed News because I loved the work and the mission of the division," Jonah Peretti, founder of Buzzfeed, told employees. "It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that the big tech platforms would not distribute the content and provide the financial support necessary to promote free, high-quality journalism, produced exclusively for social networks."
The drop in traffic to the site is believed to be due to a decline in traffic from key sources like Facebook, which is largely due to Facebook's move to encourage users to watch and share videos like TikTok.
Visits to buzzfeednews.com from Facebook on computers, worldwide from April 2020 to March 2023:
Less traffic means less ad revenue. And less revenue led to the closure of Buzzfeed's news division, which in turn put many journalists out of work.
This is clearly bad news for everyone involved, and for digital journalism more broadly. Buzzfeed News used to be a great source of in-depth, excellent journalism, creating truly impressive content that even established newspapers respected. They won numerous awards and the respect of their peers and readers. And now they can’t survive.
Buzzfeed pioneered the use of viral content and helped legitimize it as a new form of journalism. Its early success—from the launch of Buzzfeed News in 2012 until the start of layoffs in early 2019—inspired many other news organizations to create viral content of their own.
Think back to early 2013, when many publications were desperate to learn a piece of Buzzfeed’s magic. Trinity Mirror tripled its traffic overnight by launching UsVsTh3m and Ampp3d, which openly mimicked Buzzfeed’s casual, even vulgar, style.
The Sun's then-editor-in-chief, David Dinsmore, called Buzzfeed "the best thing on the internet" and launched a similar product. Even the BBC, in a report by former Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer, urged staff to be as different as Buzzfeed.
In the UK, The Independent's Indy100, with its shocking breaking news, eye-catching images and quizzes, is seen as the UK's version of Buzzfeed.
Of course, Buzzfeed was originally famous for its entertainment division that used user-generated content, with "stupid" headlines like "10 cardboard boxes that look like David Cameron" (which has since been deleted) and equally shocking quizzes, but let's not forget that they also had some pretty impressive articles.
The news department is truly professional, winning the Society of Editors' Choice News Website of the Year award in 2018 and they also took home a Pulitzer Prize in 2021.
A study by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore found that BuzzFeed News' news influence is just as great as The New York Times, and the reason is that they have a team of "hard-core" journalists capable of creating high-quality journalism.
Another 2018 study by researchers at the University of Leeds found that Buzzfeed News reporters were as sharp and well-rounded as traditional journalists, despite being relatively young and focusing on issues that appeal to readers aged 18 to 30.
The study, published in the journal Journalism Studies, found that Buzzfeed News is not just a website with clickbait content, but a serious news organization whose journalists adhere to the highest professional standards.
The closure of Buzzfeed’s news division is a warning of the difficulties facing digital journalism. After two decades, digital journalism is still struggling to find a sustainable business model. And there is no pure “new media” news organization that has managed to outperform traditional news organizations.
In Press Gazette's March 2023 ranking of the world's top news websites, the only "new media" news outlet to make the Top 25 was Buzzfeed News, and they came in at number 25.
The closure of Buzzfeed’s news division is a warning of the difficulties facing digital journalism. After two decades, digital journalism is still struggling to find a sustainable business model. And there is no pure “new media” news organization that has managed to outperform traditional news organizations.
Vice Media: Big investment but still bankrupt
Vice Media, a media conglomerate that once promised $1 billion in annual revenue, attracted eight- and nine-figure investments from the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Disney. Investors valued the company, founded in 1994 as a Montreal punk magazine, at $5.7 billion in 2017.
But Vice declared bankruptcy in early May 2023. Less than a month earlier, it laid off its entire global newsroom and shuttered its international journalism brand Vice World News. It also discontinued its weekly television show “Vice News Tonight,” which launched in 2016 and had run for more than 1,000 episodes as of this past March.
How did this happen? Joseph Teasdale, chief technology officer at Enders Analysis, points out that the problem is that Vice has never built a viable business model.
“Vice had something that convinced investors—they knew how to engage with young people—but they couldn’t figure out how to turn that into a revenue opportunity,” Teasdale notes. “They tried digital advertising, sponsored content, media representation, and even television production, but they consistently missed their revenue targets and never had a sustainable growth model.”
Jim Bilton, CEO of Wessenden Marketing, said it was technology platforms that caused Vice's financial difficulties.
"Despite its interesting and clever diversification strategy, the core business model is still based on traffic to sell advertising and ultimately relies on the tech giants to acquire readers, unlike traditional news organizations that have never owned those readers," Bilton said. "It's clear that news organizations with years of experience have more effective and clever strategies than Vice's few tricks. A trusted brand, relevant content and high-quality journalism, combined with tight management, can win in the long run."
Teasdale added that Vice, like Buzzfeed, once had faith that its online content businesses would scale like the successes of the software and technology platforms of the previous decade.
“They think that if they invest heavily, and if they grow enough users, eventually the revenue will exceed the cost of production. But journalism is not that simple: If you want users to keep coming back to your site, you need to create compelling content, and you need to keep spending money. A business model like Buzzfeed or Vice will never be profitable in the way that platforms like Facebook can.”
Vice filed for bankruptcy just weeks after Buzzfeed shuttered its news division. Insider, another digital news outlet now owned by Axel Springer, also recently announced it would lay off 10% of its US staff.
Teasdale says it's "hard to say exactly" why so many digital news outlets are struggling at the same time. "It's not easy to find investors who are willing to fund a strategy of continuous expansion: capital markets are tight due to high interest rates, and there's a domino effect where potential investors see one news outlet failing and close their wallets," he says. "The most attractive thing for these news outlets to convince investors is to make money, and that money has dried up."
Ben Smith, former BuzzFeed News Editor-in-Chief and now Semafor Editor-in-Chief, stressed that BuzzFeed News' demise was inevitable, "when users realized that their Facebook News Feed was too toxic and uninspiring; when platforms took the view that news was poison; and when Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks simply stopped directing links to news websites."
It is important to remember that social media and search engines can bring some traffic to news organizations, but they do not bring readers. Without reader loyalty, news organizations are vulnerable to changes in social media algorithms and to the decline in digital advertising. Perhaps it is now clear that online newspapers cannot rely solely on advertising to grow and make money, and certainly not on social media.
Recent developments are a warning that media organizations should not put their fate in the hands of others.
It is important to remember that social media and search engines may bring some traffic to news organizations, but they do not bring readers. Without reader loyalty, news organizations are vulnerable to changes in social media algorithms and to the decline in digital advertising.
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