So you may have noticed we were a bit quiet the last week and well, it is because we well and truly got Zucked in the beef between big news and Facebook.
Big news is claiming that Facebook should PAY them for their content being on Facebook, Facebook said “No Way!” and then the news companies went crying to the government who said how evil Facebook is and they would be forced to pay lots of money to the big news companies.
Well Facebook didn’t take too kindly to these threats and “banned” all news sites from its platform during the week. However lots of non-big corporation news outlets, and a fair few non news outlets got caught up in this which caused an outcry towards Facebook. This meant that a lot of people have missed the biggest stupidity in all this.
Facebook doesn’t DEMAND that any news company (or anyone at all) posts on its platform. We all decide what we do and don’t publish and then we also decide if we are going to spend money with Facebook as a platform to advertise that content. Every single news company that spat the dummy about Facebook does the exact same thing. They post content and then pay Facebook to advertise it to its users.
At the end of the day, if the big news places don’t want to have their content on Facebook, stop paying them to advertise it and block Facebook as the referrer to your site! Simples!
Unfortunately, Facebook went about this the wrong way using an algorithm to do the banning instead of manually doing it. It should also not have let smaller publishers get caught up in it, nor the non-news outlets and essential services.
The good news is that we are currently “UnZucked” however we are focussing more on keeping our content on our own platform. So if you want to read our articles, see our galleries and listen to the podcast when it relaunches shortly, you will need to visit our site, we will not have a paywall in place, but we will have small memberships available for a feel good price to help cover our costs (About $5 a month!).
We also have some fantastic advertising opportunities available for motorsport related businesses and will be launching some cool features for people who join up on our site (free or paid).
For now, we’re off to get ready for covering the 2021 WA Circuit racing championship which starts up at Wanneroo Raceway this weekend (side note: WA Sporting Car Club also got their page banned!). Stay tuned for lots of info, results, photos and more!
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