[nvrmnd]

I think you could easily argue that social media links to the news websites provides more value to the news website than vice-versa. If, for example, only the headline and sub-headline were quoted in the posts without the link -- which the Heritage Minister indicated would not constitute a fee -- any discussion could still take place, and certainly there would be even less benefit to the news organization.

Any news website can already prevent Facebook from generating link previews through meta tags, as I understand. But very few, if any, websites do this indicating that they understand it's not in their interests.

Perhaps people are not reading the articles because the _discussion_ is more valuable to them than the content of the article? Don't we all occasionally jump to the comment section on HN/reddit instead of reading the article? Seems to me that many news organizations have not yet figured out how to provide their customers with a product they are willing to "pay" for.

I mean, any brief visit to a small news website without an ad-blocker or, worse, a scroll through the comment section, should make this fairly evident.

[kevingadd]

"I think you could easily argue that social media links to the news websites provides more value to the news website than vice-versa. If, for example, only the headline and sub-headline were quoted in the posts without the link -- which the Heritage Minister indicated would not constitute a fee -- any discussion could still take place, and certainly there would be even less benefit to the news organization."

I don't see an argument here that supports it, though? How are they making money off having their content cannibalized?

[AmericanChopper]

The content isn’t being cannibalized, it’s being ignored. The customers they’re trying to extract revenue from have overwhelmingly decided that the content of the articles these outlets write is not worth reading. There isn’t an appropriate legislative solution for “customers aren’t interested in my product anymore”.

[chipgap98]

Then why are they making their content cannibalizable? They could make their content a walled garden, they could stop populating meta tags to make their content sharable, etc. The fact that they are choosing not to means that they like the traffic that is being generated from their content.

[nvrmnd]

Presumably some people click-through to the article. In fact, I would guess that the majority of site traffic is generated through social media postings.

These organic posts/shares likely have significantly better CTR better than a similarly formatted ad, as they would have a "Sally likes this..." header.