Social media companies are finding themselves increasingly under attack, so who’s really being unsociable?
Just like many others around the country on a weekend, I often find myself wandering into a Bunnings store attempting to ignore the temptation of the smell of sausages cooking.
Even though it is often like a quest to find the Holy Grail to find a staff member free to direct you to what you’re looking for in aisle 236, there is one staff member that you can’t miss.
Whether you’re walking in with a rumbling tummy, or a bread encased sausage wrapped your palm, the first thing you will see and hear when you wander through the front door of a Bunnings store is the ‘store welcomer’.
The store welcomer is there to greet you as you enter whether you are there to buy something or browse. Bunnings may be short on other staff at times, but making customers feel welcome and glad they came is clearly a top priority.
Bunnings are not the only business doing this, I’m greeted the same when I go to Big W, and there are many other businesses that do the same.
Now I’m not naive, I know they’re not there out of the kindness of the corporate heart, it’s a means of lowering your defense’s in a bid to put you in a purchasing mood.
Other businesses, however, operate in a different manner.
Some of those I find myself inadvertently going to have the exact opposite approach. They actually go to the effort of blocking me from entering, and then telling me that I’m not welcome to browse and unless I give them money right from the start I can’t get a look in.
These businesses are called newspapers.
Across the business world there are a vast number of industries that have been impacted by the internet and have adjusted to suit. Books, music, video, retail… even politicians have been forced to adjust in order to win elections.
The best marketing geniuses in the newspaper industry could come up with was a paywall.
The best sales technique ever?
Unfortunately, their complete failure to come up with anything remotely intelligent to hold on to their customers has meant they need to come up with something besides a paywall. That something was a plea to government that they need some else to pay, given their users were unable to see any value.
I come from the world of sales. Others familiar with the role of selling would have heard of ‘lead generators’. These are people paid to find potential customers, ascertain their interest in the product or service you are aiming to sell, and then pass that lead on to the sales professional to secure the sale. Usually lead generators are paid a commission on closed sales that originate from their lead.
You may be interested to know that newspapers also have lead generators, however in that industry they work a little differently.
In the world of newspapers, Murdoch’s News Ltd, the 9 News newspapers, and Kerry Stokes don’t pay their lead generators. The newspapers lead generators find people with an interest in a subject, entice them with a headline and image, and then send them directly to the newspaper to finalise the sale.
These lead generators are known as social media.
The likes of Murdoch, however, do not want to pay them for the leads, they expect Facebook to pay them.
Imagine if a friend sent you to a lounge retailer, they thought you may like and the lounge retailer, knowing you were interested, told you that you couldn’t look in their store unless you paid them, and furthermore, your friend was going to have to pay them as well for having sent you there.
That is the business model of an Australian newspaper.
As ridiculous as that sounds, this is the issue currently being faced by Facebook, or Meta, in Australia.
I cannot recall any time in history where one company has sent potential customers in their billions directly to another company based on an interest in that company’s product. Nevertheless, the newspaper industry’s failure to entice customers to has meant that the government may be getting involved and could attempt to force Meta to compensate companies like News Ltd for their utter incompetence.
Facebook is not stealing or publishing news, nor are they making millions from it as we hear politicians and media spokespeople claim. The sad truth is that when Facebook stopped allowing links to news sites on its network, most of the media executives cried like babies, as did the politicians.
Claims that Facebook steals the news stem from, for the most part, those that copy and paste news articles on their feed, something I see on odd occasions. But if there is a copyright infringement going on, surely that’s a job for the lawyers, not the government.
A large volume of reproduced or images of newspaper content is actually from columnists who use social media knowing most won’t read their views in the papers. If stealing content is such an issue, maybe media organisations should go after the columnists doing this, or at the very least not reward them with another column. Ever.
A zionist talks about himself in the 3rd person while possibly breaching media copyright laws?
I recently read an article that discussed the possibility that this proposed government intervention could lead to Facebook pulling out of Australia (I won’t link the article as I don’t want to receive an invoice in the mail). This would likely be a handful of nails in any government’s coffin.
Despite this ominous thought the government seems intent on doing the dirty work of the Murdoch empire, taking on X and Facebook at the same time. Facebook for a big fat cheque for Murdoch and his ilk, and X for the failure to take down a video that they seem vastly less worried about on YouTube. All this while resisting calls for a Royal Commission into Murdoch’s influence.
The main-stream media continues to bemoan its declining influence and revenues, its political commentators propping each other up broadcasting groupchats amongst themselves. Meanwhile the public continue to be delivered straight to their cash register only to find there’s nothing there to encourage them to pull out their credit card.
As for me, as long as the media favor the stick over the carrot and think the best they can offer me is a paywall, I’ll remain locked out.
By choice.
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