  In a perfect world, all articles consistently contain sufficient metadata to
describe the resource. We know this is not the reality, so we are motivated to
investigate the evolution of the metadata that is present when authors and
publishers supply their own. Because applying metadata takes time, we recognize
that each news article author has a limited metadata budget with which to spend
their time and effort. How are they spending this budget? What are the top
metadata categories in use? How did they grow over time? What purpose do they
serve? We also recognize that not all metadata fields are used equally. What is
the growth of individual fields over time? Which fields experienced the fastest
adoption? In this paper, we review 227,726 HTML news articles from 29 outlets
captured by the Internet Archive between 1998 and 2016. Upon reviewing the
metadata fields in each article, we discovered that 2010 began a metadata
renaissance as publishers embraced metadata for improved search engine ranking,
search engine tracking, social media tracking, and social media sharing. When
analyzing individual fields, we find that one application of metadata stands
out above all others: social cards -- the cards generated by platforms like
Twitter when one shares a URL. Once a metadata standard was established for
cards in 2010, its fields were adopted by 20% of articles in the first year and
reached more than 95% adoption by 2016. This rate of adoption surpasses efforts
like Schema.org and Dublin Core by a fair margin. When confronted with these
results on how news publishers spend their metadata budget, we must conclude
that it is all about the cards.
