Why is it that publications such as Broadsheet, Concrete Playground, Urban List, City Hub, Star Observer, Australian Jewish News, and Australian Chinese Daily believe that the likes of Facebook have an obligation to pay them money for content, when their sites depend on the traffic that both Google and Facebook are delivering for up to 30 publishers who have mounted a stop publishing protest.
Management from these publications and another 25 so called independent publishers are getting their knickers in a twist because they believe that the likes of Facebook and Google should be paying them for content when in reality they should be thanking Facebook and Google for the small amount of traffic that these organisations actually deliver to their sites.
What they want is funding from Facebook’s Australian News Fund and as such they have mounted a campaign #WaitingOnZuck that aims to “let the world know” that small and medium-sized publishers want money for content that appears on the Facebook system.
Research conducted by ChannelNews reveals that organisations such as Broadsheet, Concrete Playground City Hub along with Australian Jewish News, and Australian Chinese Daily deliver next to nothing in traffic every month compared top the organisations that Facebook and Google are actually paying.
A search using SEMRush Analytics reveals that in February 2022 Broadsheet could only muster 956,900 unique users, Concrete Playground 433,000, The Urbanlist 1.2M, City Hub 14,000 and Star observer 62,000 unique visitors.
The bulk of the traffic to these sites were delivered by search engines Google and Facebook.
ChannelNews in the same February 2022 period did 287,500 unique visitors and 346,000 visits and we are profitable, growing and operate out of the cash flow we generate.
The Australian Jewish News only managed 25,600 unique visitors and the Australian Chinese Daily 5,400 people through their site during the month.
The represented group called D.O.A (Decade of Action) claim that they have initiated a “collective freeze to fight for the future of Australian news media”.
I am the CEO of a small Australian publisher who publish SmartHouse, Plug, Sound Mag, and Smart Office.
We worked more than a decade ago that Facebook and Google were not going to deliver the revenue, to run a business and that one had to find a market that brands were prepared to invest in.
This so-called group of publishers are claiming that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should be making commercial deals that are “transparent and fair”.
He is investing in organisations that can firstly generate the content that people want to read and secondly in organisations that have the scale to deliver content every day, that is fresh and relevant. He is not there to prop up struggling media Company who are getting next to nothing in traffic.
The so-called quality independent journalism that these organisations are bleating about is so bad that consumers have made the decision to not visit them.
Broadsheet founder and publisher, Nick Shelton said that the unintended consequences of how the code has been handled is “that independent publishers face unprecedented competition from publishing colleagues who have struck deals”.
It’s been like this for decades so what’s new.
He added “With millions and millions of dollars now being spent on talent, marketing, technology and audience acquisition, independents are finding it impossible to compete.”
Nick that’s called competition and to be successful, you need to work out how to stand on your own two feet, instead of being propped up by a social media giant, who is taking your advertisers because they are deliver bigger and more powerful audiences which is why they are giving money to the likes of Nine Media, Nine Entertainment and Seven West.
They are delivering what the entire small medium publishers in your collective don’t have a relevant target audience and they are delivering it every day of the week.
Under the News Media Bargaining Code, which was passed over a year ago into law by Frydenberg, digital platforms were legislated to enter into negotiations with local media companies.
The reality is that no Government should legislate that social media has to invest in dud media that struggles to deliver an audience.
What these small medium publishers have to do is work out how to deliver an audience.
One thing that I have learnt is that good relevant content attracts eyeballs, and in most cases small medium publishers don’t have the budgets to invest in journalists to create fresh content every day.
Consumers hate stale web sites and a lot of the web sites whinging about not being paid are utterly boring.
Ebony Gaylor, managing partner at D.O.A said: “We are strong believers in the role of journalism, and independent journalism, in protecting a healthy democracy. Without the right funding structures, independent journalism is under threat. We want Zuckerberg and anyone else profiting off the work journalists do to pay a reasonable price.
The bottom line is that Facebook is not profiting from many of these small publishers, he’s actually doing them a favour by delivering a click to their site, take the Jewish Daily News who are doing 914 people a day Vs the 9News web site that’s doing 1.14M a day.
And that’s why Facebook and Google pay them over small publishers with no content clout.
