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Given the Meta/Canada situation, this is an amusing turn of events over in Europe. France in 2019 enacted a copyright rule dubbed “neighbouring rights” that compels large online platforms to open talks with publishers seeking remuneration for news, similar to Australia and Canada.
Well, Musk is refusing to negotiate. “This is bizarre. They want us to pay them for traffic to their site where they make advertising revenue and we don’t!?” he said.
Now, France’s Agence France-Presse has filed a lawsuit against X. Given the embattled social media platform has allegedly paid no rent and is being sued by a number of companies for not paying bills, I highly doubt AFP will see any cash from Musk. Nonetheless, this is another twist in the platforms payment battle.
If you’ve got the energy to contemplate launching on another social platform, Press Gazette has a round-up of publishers’ early moves on Meta’s Threads app. Despite Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri saying explicitly he didn’t want to prioritise news on the app, a number of major brands are getting ahead and trying to build early audiences on there.
I’m really conscious of over-sharing AI stuff in this newsletter – we could easily fill each edition with AI articles and I don’t know how useful they are to people at the coalface of publishing (feedback always welcome!) But this one has got some actual practical lessons from two projects run by MediaCorp, so it’s worth including.
Launched in 2015 by Nicolas Le Roux, La langue française is a publication specializing in French and literature. They implemented a new strategy they called “bittersweet”, which consists of giving more value to subscribers (the sweet side), whilst forcing the most reluctant to create an account to read content (the sour side). Within the first month of implementing this strategy, they were able to increase acquisition of new subscribers by 450%.
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