Opinion

Like Robert Johnson eighty-some years ago, Australian media found itself at a crossroad earlier in the new millennium, and chose to cut a deal with the devil.

Now, it seems, it has buyer’s regret. 

Mythology posits that delta bluesman Johnson – who recorded the song Cross Road Blues in the mid-1930s – had made a Faustian bargain at a crossroad in Mississippi. In return for mastery of his guitar, Johnson was said to have handed his soul to the devil.

Books, movies, academic studies have all followed in the wake of Robert Johnson’s supposed grim trade at a Deep South junction in the middle of nowhere, but we’ll never know what – if anything – ever went down.

Robert Johnson.

 

What we do know, however, is that large media companies willingly hopped into bed with social media and Google to promote their wares. They didn’t do it out of goodwill, a want for a better, more informed world – they did it because they saw its potential power and wanted a piece of it. Free of charge.

When you think back to the early days of Facebook and Twitter, nobody really knew what was going on. So you can’t blame the many media companies for gingerly hitching themselves to the social media wagons. All those Followers and Shares and Likes and Hearts and Comments! All those click-throughs! All that Real Time Interaction!

Same with Google. Why do you think journalists – who already have more than enough to do given many of them are also sub editors, photographers, graphic designers – spend time filling out SEO tags? Because they want Doctor Google to hoover up their URL. They want to be there on the first page of a news search. Not the second, third, tenth, fiftieth…

Journalists were encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to establish social media accounts by their bosses, with the sole purpose of plugging their stories. Some journos, unwisely, began to view their standing through the prism of follower numbers.

But there is no such thing as a free lunch, and although the media companies could have claimed ignorance in the early years of Google and social media, they certainly knew as time went on that US corporations were all about quid pro quo. 

 

Without content, social media platforms are like deserted buildings. The infrastructure is there, but nothing is going on, and there is no reason to visit. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram were never going to supply that content, merely the infrastructure. Content takes time, and is labour intensive. 

That is the genius of the model – they provide the meeting place, and we all supply the content, whether it be a meme, a reel, a photograph, an opinion, a link, a question. They are the executives on the 27th floor enjoying a silver service filet mignon lunch, we are the schmucks in hi-vis digging the holes and hoovering the Chiko Rolls.

At any rate, media companies knew what they were doing. They’re still doing it today.

Look, for example, at The Sydney Morning Herald’s Facebook page. Fairfax set it up and Nine runs it since the former was consumed by the latter. It has 1.3 million followers. Throughout the day it publishes many teasers and links to its SMH stories, in the hope that Facebook’s ever changing and entirely unknowable algorithm with deign to feed that teaser and URL into follower feeds.

A potential reader will then be redirected and will receive the article for free or be asked to subscribe.

Estimates change with the weather, but you can be assured that when the SMH posts a link, nowhere near all of its 1.3 million followers will see it. In fact, only a fraction of them will see it – Meta and Nine know how many, but they won’t be telling anybody. 

 

 

The same goes for the ABC, The Daily Telegraph, and any other media company looking for free promotion.

It’s worth checking the number of reactions and comments to such posts – it’s not always a good guide as to who clicks through to the story, but over time it can make a point about reader engagement. And if there is something Mark Zuckerberg likes more than just about anything else, it’s engagement. Engagement means you are on his site, and you are looking at his ads.

What Zuckerberg and the others don’t like are media organisations – or anyone else for that matter – who lure people away from their sites. Say, for example, Nine. Or News Corp. Or the ABC. As an internet user you are of no use to a social media company once you have left their site.

Media companies are fighting for the same eyeballs as social media companies, and they are eyeballs more overwhelmed with information than at any time in history. 

Anyone who has dealt with Facebook in a commercial sense (more on this below) knows that while Meta is happy for you to plug your goodies, it will be the gatekeeper as to how many people see your posts. 

Of course, if you’d be willing to pay Facebook some money, it’d be delighted to get your links in front of more eyeballs via advertisements.

In 2022 I launched a free online news site in regional NSW. It was, in some ways, a success (large readership) and in others (revenue) a glorious failure. Lots of stories were broken, in-depth features were written, and the locals got a solid free news service.

I used Facebook to get the site off the ground. Without it, I would have been left putting up posters around town, handing out leaflets, wearing a sandwich board, paying a marketing company or taking ads on the local radio. I had no time or money for these things. Facebook allowed me to quickly build an audience.

Soon enough, the algorithm decided I was ripe for the plucking, and my posts seemed to attract fewer eyeballs. Then the eyeballs would go up again. Then down. Facebook could see that, yes, my posts were generating engagement, but they were also taking people away from Facebook to my news site. I was the good guy and the bad guy.

Eventually, in an attempt to try and trick the algorithm, I tipped a few bucks into Facebook to promote some posts. All up it can’t have been more than $75. It didn’t work, because people didn’t engage with my ads in the same way they did with my posts. Every penny I’ve ever spent with Facebook hasn’t paid off, but I’m sure others have a different tale.

Which brings us to Labor’s new attempt to extract cold hard cash from Google and social media companies, to be handed to media companies.

There are two points here.

First, given that the relationship between social media companies and search engines, and news outlets, is symbiotic, why would the former give to the latter? 

Nobody has forced the news publishers to open up a shop within Zuckerberg’s building. If Zuckerberg was just taking their content and republishing it on his own site without their permission, that would be a different story. 

Or if Facebook users were publishing links against the media company’s wishes, that would also be a different story. But media companies publish little social media icons at the bottom of stories in an attempt to get you to share the stories via social media. That is their doing, not Zuckerberg’s.

Media companies hopped into bed with social media companies and Google with a plan to use them to shore up their balance sheets, and now the media wants them to cough up for this privilege.

Second, if there are pots of money floating about, instead of tipping them into a fund to help pay the healthy salaries of, say, Peter FitzSimons and Andrew Bolt, why not spare a thought for the hundreds of tiny news operations around the country? The little independent newsrooms that have little to no hope of competing for ad revenue against the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter/X, Instagram, Austereo, Win, Prime, Nine, Seven.

As a small news publisher who had previously spent three decades on Broadway and at Holt Street, I have seen how things work at the top end of town and at the bottom.

When the begging bowl gets filled, the proceeds in the past seem to have gone to those with the loudest megaphones – the major media outlets. 

Meanwhile, the independent journalists and editors who are trying to cover crime, council, community affairs, real estate, disasters, sport and everything else in rural and regional Australia, get little to nothing. 

Still, this is moot.

SBS offices.

Media companies started giving their stuff away at the start of the internet age, in the hope that electronic display ads would make up the difference of a cover price. But making a living off digital display ads is not easy, particularly if a chunk of them are being fed by the likes of Google Ads, which takes a clip on the way through.

If you want to see what a website that relies on display advertising can look like, take a gander at The Daily Mail – there are so many ads and videos popping up all around the copy that it’s difficult to focus on what is going on. Perhaps people get used to it, or perhaps a slight migraine is the price of reading about what celebrity displayed some thigh gap in the Bahamas.

People said I was crazy when I started The Orange News Examiner website. It was a hell of a ride, but they were right. 

It’s gone now, as is another free news service, The Orange App. The local paper, which was recently printing six days a week, is now down to one, and people complain about how much of it is syndicated copy, or old local news.

This is a terrible time for many media companies. Less revenue means fewer reporters, photographers, subs, graphic artists and illustrators, and that means the quality drops, and that leads to a cynical public, which leads to less revenue, and so it goes.

 

The SMH on Facebook.

People in 2024 are being asked to pay for endless subscriptions: mobile phones, TV streaming and cable, gyms, internet protection, Substacks, YouTube, games arcades. For many who may be interested in the news and current events, the idea of having to pay subs to The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Herald Sun, Crikey, The New York Times, The Times of London, Nikkei, The Economist and The LA Times is a bridge too far. 

The SMH published a story last week headlined: Social media gorged itself on a free lunch of news. The buffet could be over.

The story recalled that in 2021 the Coalition government created the news media bargaining code, which forced the likes of Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram) to tip about $200 million a year into Australian journalism. 

“It was the Australian government’s first attempt to force the companies, who have gorged themselves on a daily free lunch of news provided by legacy media outlets for more than a decade, to pay for at least a portion of the content that has drawn millions of users to their platforms,” the Herald story read.

“But Meta, in particular, did not like the code and after Canada tried to copy Australia’s laws, the company was ready. It removed all news from its platform and announced there would be no more deals with Australian media companies.”

I blame Zuckerberg for a few things that haven’t progressed the species, but this is not one of them.

And it appears a chunk of The Sydney Morning Herald‘s readers agree.

“The real question we should be asking is why doesn’t big media protect its own content if the associated advertising dollars are so critical to its business model,” asked one. “They make it freely available on the internet and then retrospectively expect big tech to pay for it.”

Nine News.

“Big media publishes its content on the internet for free. Which speaks volumes about the value they place on the journalistic content,” wrote another.

A third: “Media organisations voluntarily open an account on the social media sites and voluntarily post their news. Nobody forces them to. They did it to get their news and advertising more views. They can always stop posting their news on the sites and close their accounts.”

A fourth: “The legacy fossil media failed to adapt to the changing world and is now nothing more than rent seeking free loaders.”

A fifth: “I still have not seen one article that explains why social media companies should pay for media that is already behind a paywall?”

A sixth: “It’s all great if you are a big media company like Nine or News, but once again there is NOTHING in this for the tens of thousands of smaller publishers generating news and content in deeper niche areas with just a handful of journalists and struggling as more and more money is spent on mainstream media…”

It wasn’t all one-way traffic, though: “Nonsense, it’s time these social media parasites paid for stealing the work of hard working journalists. We can survive without Facebook, but we would be a sad place and in a bad way without the Sydney Morning Herald!”