COMMENTARY: Facebook’s fallacy

News companies deliver millions worth of engagement to Big Tech

WE’VE LET THE tech giants control the narrative for far too long.

During the months-long battles leading up to the adoption of Bill C-18, passed Thursday by the federal government, Meta’s executives used the same dollar figure repeatedly to support its case against contributing to Canadian journalism: That they deliver $230 million in annual value “for free” to Canadian news publishers through 1.9 billion worth of yearly outbound clicks from Facebook back to all of our web sites.

Unsurprisingly, this is the shallowest and most one-sided definition of value the company could possibly have come up with. I asked Meta’s head of public policy, Rachel Curran, at an event late last year what value the company ascribes to the engagement our news delivers to their platforms when, for example, there are dozens or hundreds of comments on a news article a CHCH news consumer had posted. She had no such number for me.

So, let me help. A value of $230 million for 1.9 billion annual outbound clicks works out to $0.121 per click, a tiny-sounding number to be sure. But let’s apply it to total engagement, instead of just clicks.

Facebook itself defines engagement on its platform as a like, share, comment or click on its platform. In the 28 days ending June 22 (the day the legislation passed), the CHCH News Facebook account caused 269,331 engagements, 71% of which are engagements that are not outbound links back to us and so remain within Facebook, meaning the tech platform retains this value and sells that attention to advertisers.

Applying Meta’s own per-click metric on the engagement we deliver which remains inside Facebook, over those 28 days the CHCH News account delivered $23,138 worth of value (269,331 x $0.121, less 29% links back to us) to the platform thanks to our news posts – or extrapolated over a year, close to $280,000.

That dollar figure would allow CHCH News to hire at least four more full-time journalists to help deliver professional journalism to citizens in Hamilton, Halton and Niagara. And that’s only based on the engagement we bring to Facebook. Our news stories bring value to other platforms as well including Instagram, Google, Twitter, and TikTok. 

Extrapolate that out to all the television news brands, radio broadcasters and publishers across the country and we’re talking millions upon millions of dollars of value our news delivers to Big Tech. They know this and they’re complaining, loudly, because they just don’t want to compensate us for that value. Not in Canada or anywhere else. So Meta has said it will stop the circulation of news on its platforms in Canada – because they like getting engagement and data from our news consumers for free.

Who doesn’t like free stuff?

Of course, I would also love to argue that engagement is far more valuable to Facebook than an outbound click is to www.chch.com because engagement is what any advertising-supported company is truly selling, but Meta doesn’t want to talk about that.

C-18 is simply not about links, but we in the news industry have allowed the tech companies and their supporting pundits to say it over and over like it’s the truth. We need numbers of our own to make our case.

Look, I really don’t want to lose Meta as a traffic source for www.chch.com. A little less than 20% of our site traffic comes through Facebook and they don’t charge us for that. I like free stuff too. But it’s not an equal, or fair relationship.

As a company, we support C-18 because it is the best way we can see to poke a hole in the controlling duopoly Google and Meta hold on digital advertising in Canada. Those two companies pull in 85% of the $9.6 billion annual online advertising market in Canada and we can and should share in the value we deliver to them. 

It’s time they stop threatening Canadians and come to the bargaining table.

Greg O’Brien is news director of CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ont.