I saw this story in the New York Times, and I remembered that for over a decade, FTVLive has been predicting this would happen.

For years, FTVLive has warned stations about relying so much on social media to drive traffic to the station’s website.

We always said that stations should spend the money and the effort to get viewers to come directly to the station’s website and not guide them to social media.

Here is the first couple of paragraphs from The Times story:

Campbell Brown, Facebook’s top news executive, left the company this month. Twitter, now known as X, removed headlines from the platform days later. The head of Instagram’s Threads app, an X competitor, reiterated that his social network would not amplify news.

Even Google — the strongest partner to news organizations over the past 10 years — has become less dependable, making publishers more wary of their reliance on the search giant. The company has laid off news employees in two recent team reorganizations, and some publishers say traffic from Google has tapered off.

Read the full story.