| Anyone interested in this should read Ben Thompson’s lucid analysis of the underlying economics: https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargainin... The short version is that the whole “google and facebook stole news and profit off it” narrative is false. But because the media has an immense conflict of interest in reporting on itself, they spread this narrative. Have a look at the chart in the medium article. Did circulation fall when google or facebook were founded or became popular? Nope, the decline started in the late 1980s. What about relative mindshare per capita? Turns out newspaper circulation per capita has been in a steady decline since 1950! See this chart: https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1316847491808219138... You can’t even spot google and Facebook or the internet in the circulation per capita chart. It’s just a steady downwards decline. What role do facebook and google play for media today? They send them traffic. So much so that newspapers complained mightily when google news pulled out of spain and france. They need the traffic! Meanwhile news is not how google makes its money. Michael Geist did an analysis of how newspapers are shared on social media. It turns out the bulk of the shares were from the newspapers’ own page: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2020/10/how-can-linking-to-an-ar... It is perfectly valid to dislike Google or dislike Facebook. But on this issue too many otherwise reasonable people fall for the media’s line that it is the media that supports social media giants. This just isn’t so and none of the data support it. Indeed for social media networks arguably Instagram, Snapchat and Tiktok are successful precisely because they are set up not to have news and instead they’re just fun to use. A functioning press is vital for society. But as Thompson says if we want to support it why not subsidize it directly? It is lunacy to pretend that the value exchange us from news to social media rather than the reverse. That Newscorp is the beneficiary in Australia is additional spice to the story but this issue is even broader than that. |