Digital Marketing: This Week's Top Stories - Ambire.
Once again, the story dominating social media this week has been all about Facebook who is set to reverse its recent ‘experiment’ where it removed news in response to the government’s Media Bargaining Code.
The Code officially passed federal parliament yesterday (25 February).
As you’d definitely have noticed by now – Facebook banned all news content from being shared on the site by Australian users.
Although you may have noticed some sites’ content is trickling back onto your newsfeed.
However, the ban ended up impacting more sites and content than they had initially imagined – including several state and federal health and emergency services agencies across the country, and non-news or satire sites like The Betoota Advocate.
The ABC reported that the impact of the ban was exactly what Facebook had predicted – a drop in traffic for all the major Australian news sites.
By the time a week had passed, however, many news sites had figured out how to do simple workarounds like posting screenshots or pdf articles, or simply sharing tweets which linked back to the story.
Facebook’s experiment, however, is now set to come to an end. After days of negotiations between the federal government and the social media giant, an agreement has been reached and several amendments are set to be made to the proposed media bargaining code.
This, of course, was designed to force tech companies to negotiate payment for news content from media companies.
One of the amendments will give Facebook more time to strike deals with commercial publishers and news sources. It is reported these negotiations are already well under way and some have already been struck.
Seven West was the first to sign a letter of intent to provide news content to the social network and others will follow.
The question begging to be asked, then, is who won this standoff?
This content was originally published here.
