The Facebook's Australia Playbook
Yesterday, I posted a quote where Facebook's boss, Mark Zuckerberg, promised to inflict pains on its enemies, according to the Wall Street Journal. Today, we are learning that Facebook is closing its news operations in Australia to avoid paying publishers. Now, the good people of Australia can go back to the old way of discovering news: visit the websites of the publishers. We will wait to know if that is the only pain.
I do think Australia may end up losing on this: all the news which Facebook will share now in its Australia platform would be foreign news. Not sure any country would want its citizens to be influenced that way. More so, the revenue for Facebook from news is very minimal in Australia.
I give the publishers 6 months to ask Facebook to accept them as they are! You cannot confront super-aggregators frontally and have any chance.
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