In June 2023, Meta announced it would remove all Canadian news content from its platforms, effective August 1, following the federal government’s adoption of the Online News Act.

This was received as disastrous news by the Canadian media, including Le Devoir. We perceived two major negative impacts:

• Firstly, an important part of our traffic came from Meta. This impacted a significant part of our digital advertising revenue as well.
• Secondly, Meta was the perfect discovery platform. It introduced our brand to people organically in their newsfeeds, generated newsletter signups, and led to paying subscriptions — all at low advertising costs.

Meta pulling Canadian news content from its platforms meant lower traffic, lower revenue, and fewer brand introductions. Most importantly, it meant people would not have news content promoted to them on social media.

Consequently, we needed to educate the population on the impact Meta’s decision would have on their daily news consumption.

Informing the public

That’s when we launched a multichannel strategy. We wanted to inform people that they would no longer encounter news content on social media and sought to give them concrete tools to stay informed.

First, we produced a video simulating Facebook’s environment without news in it: 

We published a Question and Answers article produced by two journalists, essentially offering readers tricks on how to stay informed. A communication containing similar content was also sent to every e-mail address in our directory.

We also set up pop-ups to inform our readers about the change, incentivising them to access our content by subscribing to our free newsletters, downloading our mobile app, or becoming paying subscribers. Before this campaign, we adjusted our pricing strategy to be more competitive than ever, removing price as a barrier to the reader’s purchasing decision.

People value news content and proved to be willing to modify their behaviour to continue consuming it. Indeed, direct traffic increased by 10 percentage points between June 2023 and February 2024. Our mobile app especially benefited from the loss of Meta, with a 26% increase in its users.

Standing on our own

In June 2023, we assumed Meta was integral to promoting our content. By February 2024, we saw that we were better off without it.

In fact, this major change in our content distribution led us to conclude that Meta was instead used as a crutch for discoverability. Without it, we were able to peel off this algorithmic layer and enter into direct communication, without filters, with our readers.

Six months after Meta’s news content ban, we have a more engaged reader base than ever. The number of pages viewed per session increased by 35% between June 2023 and February 2024 on our Web site.

Because readers view more pages per visit, they are more likely to hit our paywall. With price no longer a barrier, our digital subscriber base increased by 16% during that period to reach an all-time high number of paying subscribers.

The loss of Meta, however, certainly negatively impacted our reach: It dropped by 19% between June 2023 and February 2024.

However, our pageviews increased by 15% during that same period, confirming the traffic we lost was less engaged and hence represented more or less of a loss. Best of all, Le Devoir achieved these results with a minimal ad budget of C$3,700 for the entire campaign.

We thought Meta’s decision would hit us hard. On the contrary, it incentivised us to concentrate our efforts on our core marketing. We promoted low prices to the right people in the right state of mind. In an era where Artificial Intelligence is on everybody’s minds, we achieved these impressive results with a more traditional, hands-on strategy.

The last few months have taught us lessons. We succeeded in liberating our brand from the grip of social media as a diffusion channel by engaging readers directly with our brand.

In the coming years, our industry will face a new challenge. Generative AI in search will act as a threat, putting together the most helpful and relevant information without redirecting to news media. Organic traffic will diminish substantially. As we learned with social media, we will have to learn to break free from SEO.

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