How Bill C-18 Is Stifling Torontoverse’s Innovation

In 2021, Chris Dinn had a solid business plan, investors, and staff to support him. The former student journalist and Google employee launched Torontoverse. The site provided an interactive approach to local news by leveraging mapping technology to cover the Greater Toronto Area and serve advertisers looking for specific demographics. The goal? Torontoverse could be a free, ad-based media product that would be both profitable and develop a loyal following for its innovative technology and visual storytelling.

Torontoverse offered a way to stay informed about the city and quickly grew its audience over the next two years. But in early 2023, the landscape began to change. The Online News Act or Bill C-18, a legislation introduced by the Canadian government that would require tech companies like Meta and Google to pay news publishers for hosting content on its platforms, was gaining steam. Initially, Dinn wasn’t particularly concerned but that shifted as the discussions continued.

“It wasn't really until April that I got seriously suspicious that something was going to happen that would block our access to the market,” he says.

In June, Bill C-18 passed and Facebook’s parent company Meta responded by blocking Canadians from accessing news on its platforms. The impact of the Online News Act, especially on independent publishers, has been widely discussed across Canadian media. The general consensus is that the government’s legislation harms all media producers, but perhaps most harms small media brands — those just looking to gain and maintain traction, such as Torontoverse.

“When I talk to my peers they understand, I think, how I got burned first. But what they worry about is what happens if Google cuts off these deals or stops linking to local news. What does that mean for them?” says Dinn.

Attempted pivot

At the time, the Torontoverse team tried to pivot as much as they could to mitigate damage, like producing a newsletter amidst other projects. But no content change could withstand the impact Bill C-18 would have. Dinn says that during a week in June where Meta trialed the ban, Torontoverse’s audience dropped from 100,000 unique visitors per month to 25,000. The drastic decrease in readership means that he has had to furlough his staff and has put the publication on what he calls, “life support.” Dinn is working for Mozilla in the interim and keeping the servers going, but he says the main barrier this has created is the lack of a viewership funnel.

“It's no longer, let's pour gasoline on a burning fire,” he says. “It's like we need to go catch the embers where they really blew away and then get the fire going again.”

Without discernible ways to grow readership at the pace that Facebook allowed, Dinn says that investors are hard to attract. He’s still got content in the pipeline that he’ll publish over the next few months, but says ramping back up will have to wait.

“One of the things that can happen here is that user behaviour can change and what I was worried about doing is basically continuing to spend a lot of money making content while we wait for that to change,” he says. “But I do think there's a demand for local news, I do think that demand for Canadian news, and I think that people will find it one way or another.”

Strategizing for the future

While Meta (which also owns Instagram) has grabbed the headlines, there is significant concern that Google could choose to damage the market further. Dinn says that because of programs available to publishers, like being paid for content appearing in the Google News section of the search giant, a change at Google would be a significant risk to publishers.

Dinn sees projects like Torontoverse, where the technology in the backend can support local businesses by providing an ad product that understands its audience without being grossly invasive, as a boon for the industry. He says that those eyeing how tech giants have changed the Canadian media landscape should strategize around how they can focus on growth while also rooting themselves in deep connection with not just local audiences, but local advertisers who are still vying for opportunities to maximize their small marketing budgets.

“We need to re-establish that connection directly with audiences, whatever it takes, because the status quo is bad,” says Dinn. "[The tech companies have] decided they're going to take the market hit in Canada because that's more important to them for their global interests.”