I lay it at Google and Facebook's feet by the property of 'To whom the wealth is redistributed, also inherits the responsibility.'
They've raked in a huge percentage of the ad spend that moved digital (from print).
And they've done what with it?
They fundamentally don't want to be in the business of journalism, because it's a terrible business. So they don't create content, which now means no one does.
(And that's not even getting started on the recommendation algorithm choices they've made that have incentivized low quality content. See: YouTube)
Most of the revenue from AdSense etc. goes to the site, i.e. if there are Google ads on a newspaper's website, the newspaper is getting more of the advertiser's money than Google. The problem is this is less money than they used to get, and a lot of the sites aren't journalistic outlets, so the money gets spread pretty thin.
In theory Google and Facebook could use their cut to fund journalism, but is that really what we want? The vast majority of journalism funded (and therefore controlled) by a small handful of megacorps?
Far better to make it sustainable for individual independent journalists to make living.
Do you have a breakdown in terms of ad host vs ad platform?
We know ad host revenue generated from e.g. Google Ads.
We know CPC to advertisers.
We know Google's top line ad revenue.
But I haven't seen the margin Google et al. take out of the transaction. (CPC - host revenue) / CPC
> In theory Google and Facebook could use their cut to fund journalism, but is that really what we want? The vast majority of journalism funded (and therefore controlled) by a small handful of megacorps?
I'd prefer that? It isn't that different than the historical funding model (plus loose regulation of what a newsroom meant).
> Far better to make it sustainable for individual independent journalists to make living.
I think that's apples and oranges.
The "we have a news budget that can afford to pay a stringer or correspondent to do first-party reporting and/or investigative journalism" type organization is disappearing.
Citizen journalism is important too, but I don't think it's a replacement for the above.
As I heard quipped, "Nobody goes to every local council meeting and takes written notes, so they can catch the 1-2 agenda items a year that should be big local stories."
And absent that (or similar on an international stage), we lose transparency.
We've seen how citizen coding in open source has blind spots where security/cryptography is concerned, and I'd argue we run similar risks relying solely on citizen journalists.
They've raked in a huge percentage of the ad spend that moved digital (from print).
And they've done what with it?
They fundamentally don't want to be in the business of journalism, because it's a terrible business. So they don't create content, which now means no one does.
(And that's not even getting started on the recommendation algorithm choices they've made that have incentivized low quality content. See: YouTube)