Meta’s retreat from news accelerated in 2023, leaving publishers scrambling for traffic
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, testifies remotely as Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., watches during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing “Breaking the News: Censorship, Suppression, and the 2020 Election,” in Washington, Nov. 17, 2020.
Bill Clark | Reuters
Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein has had a front-row seat in recent years to watch Facebook upend the media industry.
Bauerlein, who took over as CEO of the publication nine years ago, remembers when about 5 million users a month visited the Mother Jones website after coming across articles distributed on Facebook. That was in 2017.
But Facebook, now known as Meta, is out of the news business, a move that’s disrupted the traffic flow for many publications — Mother Jones has seen a 99% drop in Facebook referrals since its peak — and had disastrous consequences for some. In September, Meta said it would “deprecate” its Facebook news tab in European countries including the U.K., France and Germany as “part of an ongoing effort to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most.”
The push away from news followed years of public relations disasters for Facebook regarding the company’s handling of misinformation and its decisions on when to cancel accounts and remove posts. Conservative politicians have long accused the company of operating with a liberal bias, while groups on the other side portrayed Facebook as instrumental in the 2016 election of Donald Trump because of how Russian operatives exploited the site to boost his candidacy.
“At this point, it seems pretty clear from the comments that executives at Facebook and Meta made that they have just decided that news is more trouble than it’s worth and that they will show people a fairly minimal amount of it,” Bauerlein said in an interview.
At Mother Jones, a 48-year-old nonprofit magazine specializing in politics and investigations, the implications were dramatic. Though Facebook had generated millions of referrals a month for Mother Jones during its heyday, in November and December it generated just over 58,000 and 67,000 visitors, respectively, for Mother Jones, down from about 172,000 and 228,000 in the same months a year earlier.
An analysis of 1,930 news and media websites from over 370 companies conducted by the analytics firm Chartbeat for CNBC revealed that Facebook accounted for 33% of those publishers’ overall social traffic, measured by page views, as of December, down from 50% a year earlier.
As to all external traffic, which comes from social media and search engines such as Google, Facebook represented 6% of referral volume in December 2023, down from 14% in December 2018 and 12% in December 2022. That decline is mostly due to Facebook, as Google accounted for 38% of external traffic in December, up from 26% five years earlier and 36% in 2022.
Jill Nicholson, chief marketing officer at Chartbeat, said Facebook’s social traffic decline stems from several moves at Meta, including banning Canadian users last year from sharing news on its apps after Canada’s federal government passed the Online News Act, which forced tech companies to pay content fees to domestic media outlets.
Nicholson said a similar ban by Meta in Australia in 2021 ended up “making news less accessible” in general. Facebook eventually reversed that decision after reaching a deal with the Australian government.
Meta’s strategy
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is showing little interest in wading into hot-button issues on politics and global affairs after taking numerous trips to Capitol Hill following the 2016 election. Since changing his company’s name to Meta in late 2021, Zuckerberg has been focused on investing billions of dollars a quarter to develop the futuristic metaverse while trying to fend off competition from TikTok by bolstering Reels, Meta’s short-form video product that’s used by creators.
His strategy is paying off on Wall Street. Meta’s stock closed at a record Friday, as it continues to rally following an almost 200% pop last year.
David Carr, senior insights manager at analytics firm Similarweb, said Meta’s changing approach to news isn’t all about Zuckerberg’s preferences. Users are also tired of all the online bickering.
“One of the things that Facebook has talked about as a justification or a reason why they’re making some changes is that people are happier using the service when they don’t see all that political stuff,” Carr said.
A Meta spokesperson, echoing previous statements from company executives, said the shift away from news has been driven by user behavior.
“We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content — they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests,” the spokesperson said. “We’ve made several changes to better align our investments to our products and services people value the most.”
More than just hot-button issues
In de-emphasizing news, Meta hasn’t just minimized contentious political debates. It’s made it harder for publications of all types and sizes to circulate stories to Facebook’s 3 billion monthly users.
Data from Similarweb showed that the top 100 global news publishers saw Facebook referral traffic plummet in 2023 from 2022 following a steady decline over several years.
Facebook represented 2.7% of the Daily Mail’s global referral traffic in November 2023, a decline from 6.5% in November 2020 and 3.8% in November 2022, according to Similarweb. For The Independent, Facebook’s contribution dropped to 1.3% of traffic in November from 6.5% three years earlier and 4% in 2022.
Publications have had to adapt, finding other ways to draw in traffic. For some ad-based sites that needed the big Facebook numbers to make money, the change was existential.
BuzzFeed, once known for viral posts and videos, shut down its BuzzFeed News site in April. The company still owns news site HuffPost, but its main site largely contains entertainment content, quizzes and videos.
The company has a market cap of under $35 million — nine years after Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC, invested at a $1.5 billion valuation. BuzzFeed’s estimated Facebook referral traffic was 12% in November 2023, down from 15% a year earlier, according to Similarweb.
Vice Media, which was valued at $5.7 billion in 2017, declared bankruptcy in May.
Alternate routes
Some top media brands experienced a bigger drop in Facebook traffic in earlier years as they recognized over time the need to diversify their sources of distribution. Across the media industry, news organizations have been steadily weaning themselves from reliance on Facebook.
Sam Cholke, an audience growth and distribution manager for the Institute for Nonprofit News, cited The Texas Tribune and Montana Free Press as examples of publications that are taking other routes to finding readers. The Texas Tribune, an online nonprofit paper launched in 2009, is leveraging in-person events to attract readers, while the Montana Free Press, started in 2016 by journalist John S. Adams, is running billboard ads in the capital city of Helena.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti told analysts on his company’s earnings call in August that he’s “laser-focused” on a new strategy involving the use of artificial intelligence to help generate content in addition to relying more on creators.
“As Facebook and other major tech platforms continue to prioritize vertical video, traffic referrals from these platforms to our content have diminished,” Peretti said on the call.
Jessica Probus, BuzzFeed’s publisher, told CNBC in an interview that BuzzFeed’s “biggest shift” in its Facebook and audience strategy occurred around 2021. While there was a “slow trickle decline for a long time,” the major “turning point,” she said, occurred when Meta began going more directly after TikTok.
BuzzFeed decided to “take an even bigger emphasis on our own properties,” which included its core app and website as well as others such as HuffPost and Tasty.
BuzzFeed is looking for other ways to make money, which includes selling sponsorships, subscriptions and memberships, and a commerce business that’s “monetized through transactions, things that people are buying through our site,” Probus said.
‘Firehose of Facebook traffic’
Because Mother Jones is a nonprofit and relies on donors and subscribers rather than primarily ads, Bauerlein said the publication has been able to weather the social media storm better than others.
“The firehose of Facebook traffic was never going to pay for our journalism, for the majority of our journalism,” Bauerlein said. Regarding the pursuit of traffic by media upstarts, Bauerlein said, “a lot of venture capital was burned in the process.”
Bauerlein said Mother Jones has still managed to attain more Facebook followers than ever before, which she said points to the level of consumer appetite for its stories even if they’re harder to find.
“Now, you’re just not seeing that information that you chose to see,” Bauerlein said. That’s “a real broken promise to the users, especially at a time when the world is incredibly complicated and incredibly hard to understand.”
Cholke said that when it comes to Facebook and news, the writing has been on the wall for years. Last decade, many publishers saw their “social traffic decline pretty dramatically,” with Facebook deprioritizing text-based articles in favor of video content, Cholke said. In 2019, Facebook paid $40 million in a settlement to advertisers who alleged in a lawsuit that the company overinflated its video metrics, resulting in higher-priced video ads.
“For a lot of people, me included, it was one of the first signals that we’ve got to get smart about this,” Cholke said.
The 400-plus North American media outlets associated with the Institute for Nonprofit News are scrambling to find ways to reach readers, Cholke said. Some publishers are doubling down on Google search traffic, a strategy that poses other risks.
Last year, for example, a bug in Google Discover, a personalized news and content feed, caused traffic to decline for a number of publishers.
On top of the changes at Facebook, that’s led to the question: “What are the other options?” Cholke said.
Chartbeat’s Nicholson said one site that’s being used is YouTube, where “some are branching out into monetizing social video.” But for the most part, she said, publications have to rely more on “their own operated platforms,” where traffic patterns are less volatile.
“When those trends started going downward for social in terms of a referral source, that is where people really got into the business of diversification, investing more into newsletters and apps,” Nicholson said.
‘A diminishing return’
Longtime media columnist Mathew Ingram, a chief digital writer at the Columbia Journalism Review, said Facebook was “never a good place” for news, because it “focused on emotion and sharing for other purposes” rather than on seeking the truth.
That was true even when Facebook focused on news. But when the platform began pushing news stories down, the economics stopped working.
“In order to keep your traffic and all your numbers where they were, you just try three times as hard, and then eventually, you’re sort of blowing all this time and resources for a diminishing return,” Ingram said.
Data from the Pew Research Center shows that TikTok is taking some market share when it comes to where consumers get their news.
In a study published in November, Pew found that the percentage of U.S. adults who say they regularly turn to TikTok for news has more than quadrupled since 2020 to 14% from 3%. Elisa Shearer, a senior researcher at Pew, told CNBC that over that stretch the portion of Facebook users who said they regularly get news on the site has dropped to 43% from 54%.
But the way people access news on TikTok is different. Rather than seeing links to stories from outside publications, the news tends to be delivered by influencers in short videos. That makes it a particularly poor source of traffic for media outlets.
Still, Bauerlein said Mother Jones is building a bigger presence on TikTok as well as Instagram because the publication wants to find consumers where they are and “serve people who are looking for trustworthy information,” she said.
“If we all end up finding news in the metaverse, then you’ll be finding Mother Jones in the metaverse,” she said. What Mother Jones won’t do, she said, is “bet everything on one platform, because that never works out.”
Disclosure: Comcast-owned NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.
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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during the Microsoft Build conference at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on May 21, 2024.
Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images
A half-century ago, childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft from a strip mall in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Five decades and almost $3 trillion later, the company celebrates its 50th birthday on Friday from its sprawling campus in Redmond, Washington.
Now the second most valuable publicly traded company in the world, Microsoft has only had three CEOs in its history, and all of them are in attendance for the monumental event. One is current CEO Satya Nadella. The other two are Gates and Steve Ballmer, both among the 11 richest people in the world due to their Microsoft fortunes.
While Microsoft has mostly been on the ascent of late, with Nadella turning the company into a major power player in cloud computing and artificial intelligence, the birthday party lands at an awkward moment.
The company’s stock price has dropped for four consecutive months for the first time since 2009 and just suffered its steepest quarterly drop in three years. That was all before President Donald Trump’s announcement this week of sweeping tariffs, which sent the Nasdaq tumbling on Thursday and Microsoft down another 2.4%.
Cloud computing has been Microsoft’s main source of new revenue since Nadella took over from Ballmer as CEO in 2014. But the Azure cloud reported disappointing revenue in the latest quarter, a miss that finance chief Amy Hood attributed in January to power and space shortages and a sales posture that focused too much on AI. Hood said revenue growth in the current quarter will fall to 10% from 17% a year earlier
Nadella said management is refining sales incentives to maximize revenue from traditional workloads, while positioning the company to benefit from the ongoing AI boom.
“You would rather win the new than just protect the past,” Nadella told analysts on a conference call.
The past remains healthy. Microsoft still generates around one-fifth of its roughly $262 billion in annual revenue from productivity software, mostly from commercial clients. Windows makes up around 10% of sales.
Meanwhile, the company has used its massive cash pile to orchestrate its three largest acquisitions on record in a little over eight years, snapping up LinkedIn in late 2016, Nuance Communications in 2022 and Activision Blizzard in 2023, for a combined $121 billion.
“Microsoft has figured out how to stay ahead of the curve, and 50 years later, this is a company that can still be on the forefront of technology innovation,” said Soma Somasegar, a former Microsoft executive who now invests in startups at venture firm Madrona. “That’s a commendable place for the company to be in.”
When Somasegar gave up his corporate vice president position at Microsoft in 2015, the company was fresh off a $7.6 billion write-down from Ballmer’s ill-timed purchase of Nokia’s devices and services business.
Microsoft is now in a historic phase of investment. The company has built a $13.8 billion stake in OpenAI and last year spent almost $76 billion on capital expenditures and finance leases, up 83% from a year prior, partly to enable the use of AI models in the Azure cloud. In January, Nadella said Microsoft has $13 billion in annualized AI revenue, more even than OpenAI, which just closed a financing round valuing the company at $300 billion.
Microsoft’s spending spree has constrained free cash flow growth. Guggenheim analysts wrote in a note after the company’s earnings report in January, “You just have to believe in the future.”
Of the 35 Microsoft analysts tracked by FactSet, 32 recommend buying the stock, which has appreciated tenfold since Nadella became CEO. Azure has become a fearsome threat to Amazon Web Services, which pioneered the cloud market in the 2000s, and startups as well as enterprises are flocking to its cloud technology.
Winston Weinberg, CEO of legal AI startup Harvey, uses OpenAI models through Azure. Weinberg lauded Nadella’s focus on customers of all sizes.
“Satya has literally responded to emails within 15 minutes of us having a technical problem, and he’ll route it to the right person,” Weinberg said.
Still, technology is moving at an increasingly rapid pace and Microsoft’s ability to stay on top is far from guaranteed. Industry experts highlighted four key issues the company has to address as it pushes into its next half-century.
Microsoft didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Regulation
There’s some optimism that the Trump administration and a new head of the Federal Trade Commission will open up the door to the kinds of deal-making that proved very challenging during Joe Biden’s presidency, when Lina Khan headed the FTC.
But regulatory uncertainty remains.
It’s not a new risk for Microsoft. In 1995, the company paid a $46 million breakup fee to tax software maker Intuit after the Justice Department filed suit to block the proposed deal. Years later, the DOJ got Microsoft to revamp some of its practices after a landmark antitrust case.
Microsoft pushed through its largest acquisition ever, the $75 billion purchase of video game publisher Activision, during Biden’s term. But only after a protracted legal battle with the FTC.
At the very end of Biden’s time in office, the FTC opened an antitrust investigation on Microsoft. That probe is ongoing, Bloomberg reported in March.
Nadella has cultivated a relationship with Trump. In January, the two reportedly met for lunch at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, alongside Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
President Donald Trump shakes hands with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during an American Technology Council roundtable at the White House in Washington on June 19, 2017.
Nicholas Kamm | AFP | Getty Images
The U.S. isn’t the only concern. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority said in January that an independent inquiry found that “Microsoft is using its strong position in software to make it harder for AWS and Google to compete effectively for cloud customers that wish to use Microsoft software on the cloud.”
Microsoft last year committed to unbundling Teams from Microsoft 365 productivity software subscriptions globally to address concerns from the European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission.
Noncore markets
Fairly early in Microsoft’s history the company became the world’s largest software maker. And in cloud, Microsoft is the biggest challenger to AWS. Most of the company’s revenue comes from corporations, schools and governments.
But Microsoft is in other markets where its position is weaker. Those include video games, laptops and search advertising.
Mary Jo Foley, editor in chief at advisory group Directions on Microsoft, said the company may be better off focusing on what it does best, rather than continuing to offer Xbox consoles and Surface tablets.
“Microsoft is not good at anything in the consumer space (with the possible exception of gaming),” wrote Foley, who has covered the company on and off since 1984. “You’re wasting time and money on trying to figure it out. Microsoft is an enterprise company — and that is more than OK.”
It’s unlikely Microsoft will back away from games, particularly after the Activision deal. Nearly $12 billion of Microsoft’s $69.6 billion in fourth-quarter revenue came from gaming, search and news advertising, and consumer subscriptions to the Microsoft 365 productivity bundle. That doesn’t include sales of devices, Windows licenses or advertising on LinkedIn.
“As a company, Microsoft’s all-in on gaming,” Nadella said in 2021 in an appearance alongside gaming unit head Phil Spencer. “We believe we can play a leading role in democratizing gaming and defining that future of interactive entertainment, quite frankly, at scale.”
AI pressure
Microsoft has an unquestionably strong position in AI today, thanks in no small part to its early alliance with OpenAI. Microsoft has added the startup’s AI models to Windows, Excel, Bing and other products.
The breakout has been GitHub Copilot, which generates source code and answers developers’ questions. GitHub reached $2 billion in annualized revenue last year, with Copilot accounting for more than 40% of sales growth for the business. Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, right, speaks as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman looks on during the OpenAI DevDay event in San Francisco on Nov. 6, 2023.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
But speedy deployment in AI can be worrisome.
The company is “not providing the underpinnings needed to deploy AI properly, in terms of security and governance — all because they care more about being ‘first,'” Foley wrote. Microsoft also hasn’t been great at helping customers understand the return on investment, she wrote.
AI-ready Copilot+ PCs, which Microsoft introduced last year, aren’t gaining much traction. The company had to delay the release of the Recall search feature to prevent data breaches. And the Copilot assistant subscription, at $30 a month for customers of the Microsoft 365 productivity suite, hasn’t become pervasive in the business world.
“Copilot was really their chance to take the lead,” said Jason Wong, an analyst at technology industry researcher Gartner. “But increasingly, what it’s seeming like is Copilot is just an add-on and not like a net-new thing to drive AI.”
Innovation
At 50, the biggest question facing Microsoft is whether it can still build impressive technology on its own. Products like the Surface and HoloLens augmented reality headset generated buzz, but they hit the market years ago.
Teams was a novel addition to its software bundle, though the app’s success came during the Covid pandemic after the explosive growth in products like Zoom and Slack, which Salesforce acquired. And Microsoft is still researching quantum computing.
In AI, Microsoft’s best bet so far was its investment in OpenAI. Somasegar said Microsoft is in prime position to be a big player in the market.
“To me, it’s been 2½ years since ChatGPT showed up, and we are not even at the Uber and Airbnb moment,” Somasegar said. “There is a tremendous amount of value creation that needs to happen in AI. Microsoft as much as everybody else is thinking, ‘What does that mean? How do we get there?'”
Technology
Nvidia positioned to weather Trump tariffs, chip demand ‘off the charts,’ says Altimeter’s Gerstner
Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner said Thursday that he’s moving out of the “bomb shelter” with Nvidia and into a position of safety, expecting that the chipmaker is positioned to withstand President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.
“The growth and the demand for GPUs is off the charts,” he told CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report,” referring to Nvidia’s graphics processing units that are powering the artificial intelligence boom. He said investors just need to listen to commentary from OpenAI, Google and Elon Musk.
President Trump announced an expansive and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday. The plan established a 10% baseline tariff, though many countries like China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to steeper rates. The announcement sent stocks tumbling on Thursday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq down more than 5%, headed for its worst day since 2022.
The big reason Nvidia may be better positioned to withstand Trump’s tariff hikes is because semiconductors are on the list of exceptions, which Gerstner called a “wise exception” due to the importance of AI.
Nvidia’s business has exploded since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and annual revenue has more than doubled in each of the past two fiscal years. After a massive rally, Nvidia’s stock price has dropped by more than 20% this year and was down almost 7% on Thursday.
Gerstner is concerned about the potential of a recession due to the tariffs, but is relatively bullish on Nvidia, and said the “negative impact from tariffs will be much less than in other areas.”
He said it’s key for the U.S. to stay competitive in AI. And while the company’s chips are designed domestically, they’re manufactured in Taiwan “because they can’t be fabricated in the U.S.” Higher tariffs would punish companies like Meta and Microsoft, he said.
“We’re in a global race in AI,” Gerstner said. “We can’t hamper our ability to win that race.”
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