In September, Meta announced the launch of Meta One, a subscription-based service for Facebook and Instagram with “enhanced AI features.” What Meta did not say is that Meta One also appears to be intended to greatly reduce businesses sharing links on Facebook.

Many businesses that generate content, such as this one, rely on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms to amplify that content via shared links. To date, Meta has freely provided that service, though it has greatly limited people’s ability to see it. With Meta One, the company now appears to be trying to make shared links from businesses disappear almost completely, outside of content from companies with large budgets.

The new Meta One platform charges businesses for sharing links. The charges are steep and highly restrictive.

With a free plan, content creators are now able to publish two links in posts or comments per month. If one goes with a $15/month paid plan, they are able to publish (wait for it) two links per month. That’s right, there is no difference in the number of links a business can use between the free version and the $15/month version. Enticing, right?

The next step up gives Meta One subscribers the ability to publish eight links per month at $50. The cost to use up to 20 links is $150/month. To use an unlimited number of links, businesses can purchase a ‘Max Plan’ at $500/month.

What does this look like in a real world example? At Northwest Wine Report, I typically publish 12-14 articles per month. If I wanted to post links to all of them on Facebook, it would cost $150/month.

That is absurd.

Keep in mind Meta is already demoting posts with links, throttling how many people see the content. There is no way that Meta will stop doing this. So, businesses would now be paying a substantial amount of money to post links while Meta still restricts how many people see the content? What an offer!

Why is Meta doing this? Meta has always hated links. Like Jack in The Shining, Meta wants you to stay on its platform forever and ever and ever. A link allows you to leave.

What will the effect be on businesses that use Facebook for amplification? It will likely be dramatic. To give a historical example, when Facebook first started demoting content with links in 2017, it reduced Facebook-driven traffic to this site by 75% overnight. I expect the link sharing restrictions to have a similarly deleterious effect.

Over the years, businesses and content creators have used various methods to try to get around Meta demoting content with links, such as putting links in comments. Meta will now restrict users’ ability to do that too.

The big takeaway? Meta is not serious about creating a subscription service for businesses with Meta One. Otherwise, it would offer plans that make some semblance of sense in terms of what is offered and the pricing.

That is not what Meta One does. Rather, Meta One is intended to make most shared links from businesses on Facebook go away, permanently.

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