The Online News Act Disaster That Wasn't

I’ve drifted into a comfortable Sunday/Wednesday publishing schedule of late here at The Audit. But something just this side of “timely” came up, so here I am again for a one-off, mid-mid-week post.

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When the Liberal’s Online News Act (Bill C-18) became law back in June 2023, I was among many who predicted catastrophic consequences. There was no way the online giants, Google (Alphabet) and Facebook (Meta) would give in to Canada’s posturing and agree to pay Canadian news media outlets for the privilege of sending them more traffic.

In the end, Facebook chose to comply with the law by removing all Canadian news links from their platforms - deftly sidestepping the need to pay anything to anyone. And Google worked out an agreement that generated only marginally more cash than what they’d been paying previously.

The law was, indeed, a hot, messy failure.

And what wasn’t there to love here? We all got to feel good about a smug, arrogant, and out-of-touch government bringing disaster on the heads of a smug, arrogant, and out-of-touch industry.

Now, however, I have to acknowledge that things really haven’t worked out the way we expected. Oh, the law itself was a master class in bad legislation, and boy did Big Tech play ‘em all for fools. And The Hub just published a breathless piece about how online engagement for both local and national news outlets has tanked since Bill C-18 became law. Specifically, there was a 24 percent engagement drop for national news and 58 percent for local.

But.

Either The Hub has made a (rare) mistake, or I don’t know how to read numbers. I’ll let you decide.

You see, the news industry doesn’t actually need social media engagement to survive. Instead, they used to rely on social media engagement to drive traffic back to their own websites. Why? Because that was where they could post ads on which their users could click. More clicks, more income. As far as I can tell, their Meta accounts never directly generated a single dollar.

So from a revenue perspective it doesn’t matter how many people there are spitting their hatred and outrage at each other on CBC’s Instagram page. All that matters is how many eyeballs visit cbc.ca. And - surprise, surprise - that number has been unambiguously rising (for the big players at least…shame about all those small media outlets). Take a look at the monthly data for CBC, CTV, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Global News, and the National Post (underlying data courtesy of SimilarWeb):