Changes in social media and online ads are killing the online MSM
MSM outlets built a huge presence on the internet, and social media sites and search engines made sure to shift valuable traffic their way. However, social media is no longer sending them traffic, which, combined with privacy-based changes in ad structure, means the big sites are on life support.
From the internet’s beginning, both major leftist news sites and smaller conservative sites earned revenue the same way: They placed ads on their sites, and advertisers paid the site owner a fee for clicks. Lots of traffic meant lots of revenue. This got people used to getting these sites’ content for “free,” making them resistant to the subscriptions they once paid without thinking for newspapers and magazines.
Then, social media appeared, becoming the sites that most people visited. American businesses, including media outlets, immediately got Facebook pages, although they struggled to get people to visit those pages. News and opinion purveyors couldn’t figure out how to monetize the small traffic on their social media pages. After all, they didn’t get money if readers visited their Facebook pages.
Cyrus Massoumi figured out the answer: Buy cheap ads on Facebook itself to sell your own Facebook page. Then, use those followers to drive traffic to internet sites where he ran genuine third-party ads that paid him. In sum, he paid a dime to get Facebook followers and then earned a dollar when each follower, guided by his Facebook posts, went to his revenue-earning websites.
Now, we take that approach for granted. However, before Massoumi had the idea, nobody was aggressively getting social media followers for the sole purpose of driving those same followers to their ad-rich websites.
Image made using pictures from rawpixel and jcomp.
What happens, though, when social media users stop going to your websites? Well, that’s bad. Axios reports that the top global sites barely get traffic referrals from Facebook or X (aka Twitter). Since 2020, Facebook referrals have dropped from a high of around 120 million to their current 21.4 million. Meanwhile, X referrals have dropped from a high of around 55 million to their current 22.6 million.
Axios claims incoherently that this is the fault of that pesky “misinformation” (code for conservative content):
Regulatory pressure and free speech concerns have pushed tech giants to abandon efforts to elevate quality information, leaving the public more susceptible to misinformation ahead of the 2024 election.
In other words, tech giants no longer block content only to conservative sites but to leftist sites, too.
My own theory is that Facebook, once the biggest traffic driver (hence Massoumi’s big idea), is dying. Admittedly, after a frustrating time spent trying to find data about a drop in Facebook usage, I stopped looking. Instead, this theory is based on an “N” of one: namely, me.
Although I never post on Facebook. As a political writer, it’s been useful for me to see what Democrats I have known over the years say about political and social issues. For several years, it was always “Trump is evil,” to which was added, “I wear masks and get all the COVID shots.”
This past year, though, even the most inveterate posters are not adding content. Sometimes, it’ll be two or three days before my feed really updates with new posts from people I know. I feel that politically oriented people are thinking, “If you can’t say anything good about Biden, don’t say anything at all.”
Thus, what my “N” of one tells me is that people just aren’t that into posting anymore. And if they’re not sharing news, even MSNBC isn’t getting traffic.
There are also problems with the ads themselves. As Don Surber points out, advertisers mined people’s computers for private information. That led to people using ad blockers and to an EU law forcing companies to stop tracking that information. Suddenly, people weren’t seeing ads at all, or they weren’t getting targeted ads. With advertisers getting smaller benefits from website clicks, they either withdrew their ads or dropped their payments.
Like Don Surber, I’m delighted to see the life blood drain out of the MSM. The MSM’s behavior during the Trump years proved that the media weren’t true journalists, purveying facts to the public. Instead, they were Democrat party hacks using the trust they’d gained since WWII to advance the party’s interests.
However, even good things have a downside. The collapse in ad revenue affects everyone—including conservative sites. Indeed, conservative sites were at the leading edge of this problem because they were the first to have their content blocked on leftist social media beginning in 2020.
That’s why, as you’ve all noticed, American Thinker is running more ads than it used to, with the ads more aggressively demanding your attention. We don’t like this any more than you do. However, any site other than a free, personal blog on WordPress or Blogger requires revenue, and there are only two sources of revenue: Ads or subscribers. If you’d like to help us out, please consider subscribing, which will also allow you to leave comments.