[ece]

I think there are 3 reasons I can think of why newspapers are demanding more from FB/Google:

1) Ad-spend has gone digital and especially local newspapers have had a hard time transitioning. FB/Google have captured the growth here over the past decade or so.

2) Changes in the FB news feed has large affects on their traffic, something which they have no control over.

3) They can't build a subscriber-only moat if they have to give away stories for people to click through on sites like FB.

I think number 3 can be worked around with summaries, or offering limited full story views/month, and number 2 is unfortunate, but better content will win out and help with number 3 as well.

Number 1 is where they have the strongest case to want a profit sharing agreement, and that's what FB/Google are basically doing. Whether this will help those organizations that actually need help is to be seen. I hope it does, especially local newspapers. If stories like these are true, then $1 billion is only 1/5th of the captured value: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-new...