Meta prices the outbound link, and publishers are only exempt for now

Meta is testing a cap on how many external links Facebook and Instagram business pages can post for free, and is using its new Meta One subscription to sell higher allowances. Without a subscription, some pages hit a ceiling of two Facebook links a month. News publishers are excluded for now, Press Gazette understands, but Meta has not confirmed how it defines that category and small publishers have already been told they hit the limit. The tiers are steep: $49.99 (£37.65) a month for eight links, $149.99 (£112.98) for 20, and $499.99 (£376.60) for unlimited, while the $14.99 (£11.29) Essential plan keeps the two-link limit. The restriction also reaches links in comments, closing the "link in first comment" workaround social teams have used for years. "Facebook used to court publishers for their links and now it's experimenting with charging pages for the privilege of sending people away from Facebook," said social media expert Matt Navarra, who called the comment restriction "where it gets particularly painful." Navarra's read on what to do: "If Facebook is still sending a publisher significant traffic and that traffic converts into subscriptions, registrations or meaningful ad revenue then paying for more links may simply become another distribution cost... I'd treat it like paid acquisition." The bigger lesson he draws is that "Meta owns the tap and now it's putting a price on that tap."

The crux

A platform that spent a decade throttling outbound links is now selling them back, which turns distribution into a line-item cost and makes the direct audience relationship the only asset a publisher actually owns.

Sell-side read

Treat paid link allowances as paid acquisition and benchmark them against Facebook's true converted value, not its historical referral volume. For most publishers that already lost referrals to algorithm changes, the honest answer is that the subscription will not pay for itself, and the exemption is a reprieve, not a settlement.

Watch

whether Meta formalises the publisher exemption in writing, and whether it extends the link cap to the news-page category it currently excludes.