Our Secret Weapon in Social Media Landscape

Jeff Green | Aug 16, 2023

As of last week, as readers of our August 10 editorial are aware, the Frontenac News has been blocked from Facebook, presumably until the dispute between the Government of Canada and Meta is resolved.

At the news, we are like a flea caught up in a battle between giants, to be sure. The government of Canada spent $969 billion in 2022 on programs and services, and Meta made $116 billion in profit (down a couple of billion from the previous year) There are a few less zeros in both the gross and net revenue numbers for our little newspaper.

Luckily for the Frontenac News, Google has decided, thus far, to negotiate with the government, as the implementation orders for Bill C-18 are being worked out. Facebook is a very good way to drive traffic to frontenacnews.ca, but the fact that we have over 10,000 articles indexed on Google Chrome, makes Google it a much stronger driver of motivated readers to our current and historical content.

And as we also pointed out last week, we have no problem with either Google or Meta. We use their free services voluntarily, and until recently never thought that a revenue stream from them was either expected or warranted. Not that we would turn down the money if it was available to us.

But in any case, we have a secret weapon in our effort to reach readers in Frontenac County, Addington Highlands, and the Maberly area.

Many of the people reading this article are in on the secret.

It is paper, the news paper that gets delivered to every household in the mail, each week. Talk about market penetration.

Almost all of those households have multiple devices (phones, tablets, computers) where they can access our websites – Frontenacnews.ca and Eveythingfrontenac.ca – along with billions of other websites. The advantage of a newspaper over the Internet is the certainty that everyone in the region will receive it each week. You can read the whole paper, one article or one ad, or toss it out, but the fact that it arrives at every door is something that no social media company, no matter how global they are, can claim.

So, if someone wants to sell their wares to people in a place like Verona, for example, a print ad in the Frontenac News is at least as good a place to start as a Facebook or Google ad campaign. It is true that no one in Singapore will see that ad in the Frontenac News, but only businesses who sell goods in Singapore would benefit from that reader.

This is how the Frontenac News survives, and thrives, in a modern world.

It is pretty easy to pick up the paper and read it. It’s simple and efficient, painless even. And for those readers who need some fire wood, they check out the classifieds on page 9. For those who an electrician, a septic pump out, it is in with the community columns on page 4 or 5. Want to sell a house? Look below.

The fact is that while the Internet is a great way to reach readers, it is a difficult place to translate that readership into revenue for news organizations, because Google and Meta control powerful platforms and are able to generate revenue from readership for themselves

As one national columnist wrote, Google and Facebook do not steal content form news sites, they steal advertisers. When the dust settles, whether there is a revenue stream flowing from the giant technology companies all the way to local newspapers like the Frontenac News or not, it will not be a game changer for us.

At some point, we will need to figure out how to generate more money from the readers who view our content on the Internet, because the readers of our print edition, who do generate revenue for us, can’t shoulder the entire burden forever.

But for now, enjoy your paper, and don’t forget to patronise the advertisers.

They bring the News to your door.