Complete Story
12/07/2017
What the news business needs from Google and Facebook
Google and Facebook say, often, that they want to help news organizations. They’re holding listening sessions, running pilot projects, rolling out new tools, stepping up those kind of overtures since fake news distributed on their platforms and propaganda targeted using their technology helped flip the 2016 presidential election.
AMP and Instant Articles were introduced to speed up mobile web page loads, in theory helping news organizations extend their mobile audience—AMP on the open web and Facebook within its walled garden. But Facebook offered a somewhat generous revenue share (100 percent of revenue on ads sold by the publisher, and 70 percent of revenue on ads sold by Facebook).
More recently, both companies have worked on features that would help publishers sign up new subscribers as a big push has been made away from reliance on advertising and toward reader revenue. These moves are coming without much apparent direct self-interest by or benefit to Google and Facebook, other than staving off the drumbeat of criticism about what they’ve done to the economics of the news business.
And that brings us to the heart of the issue— the thing that most of the “duopoly’s” efforts to help journalists so far have barely nibbled at.
Even more than Google and Facebook have upended, and now control, publishers’ relationship with and access to readers, they have destroyed the ability to sustainably fund journalism through advertising.
In 2017, they will capture an estimated 63 percent of the digital advertising market in the U.S., with Google taking in $35 billion, up 18.9 percent, and Facebook $17.37 billion, up 40.4 percent.
