Meta's Media Meter: Company Claims News Links A Small Part of Facebook Feeds Content

I’ve written quite a bit about the various legislations proposed worldwide over the last few years that would force Big Tech companies to pay media organizations, directly and indirectly, for the content they use.

Recently, Meta commissioned a consulting firm to “review the economic evidence on whether Facebook is extracting an unfair share of the value of news publishers’ links to their content across the globe.”

According to the report, entitled “Meta and the News: Assessing the Value of the Bargain,” less than 3% of what’s seen in Facebook Feeds are news links, representing what it categorizes as “an economically small and diminishing role” that publisher content plays on the platform.

At the same time, the report says, publishers “reap considerable economic benefits” through traffic-driving exposure, which the report approximates as between 1% and 1.5% of their total revenue.

“While exposure on Facebook is valuable to publishers, Facebook is not a ‘must-have’ platform for publishers and does not have sufficient bargaining leverage to impose unreasonable terms,” says NERA’s Jeffrey Eisenach, author of the report and co-chair of the consulting firm’s Communications, Media and Internet Practice.