SYDNEY -- Facebook on Monday rejected calls from the Australian government and news companies that it share advertising revenue with the media, suggesting it would rather cut news content from its platform.
The US tech giant said in a submission to Australia's competition watchdog that news represents a "very small fraction" of the content in an average user's news feed.
"If there were no news content available on Facebook in Australia, we are confident the impact on Facebook’s community metrics and revenues in Australia would not be significant," it said in a thinly veiled threat to boycott local news companies.
"Given the social value and benefit to news publishers, we would strongly prefer to continue enabling news publishers’ content to be available on our platform," it said.
In an effort being closely watched around the world, Australia is set to unveil plans to force Facebook and Google to share advertising revenue they earn from news featured in their services.
The initiative has been strongly pushed by Australia's two biggest media companies, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and Nine Entertainment.
They argue that the crisis roiling the news industry worldwide is mainly because of Google, Facebook and other large tech firms capturing the vast majority of online advertising revenues, without fairly compensating media companies for advertisements placed against news content.
The loss of advertising dollars that previously flowed to newspapers has forced cutbacks and bankruptcies across the sector, a process exacerbated by the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
In Australia, News Corp, Nine and other media have both announced major cuts in editorial staff, with more than 170 newsrooms and newspapers suspended or shuttered in recent years.
Australia's competition regulator, the ACCC, has estimated that Google and Facebook together earn some Aus$6 billion (US$4 billion) a year from advertising in the country.
Leading news publishers have demanded the two companies pay at least 10 percent of that money each year to local news organisations.
Google last month rejected the demand, saying it made barely Aus$10 million a year from news-linked advertising.
The two companies' positions bode ill for negotiations the ACCC hopes to pursue between the tech firms and Australian media companies over a mandatory "code of conduct" governing issues such as revenue sharing, curbing disinformation, data sharing and protecting user privacy.
The ACCC has until the end of July to draw up the final code, which the government has said it will quickly implement.
Agence France-Presse
NEW YORK -- America's free online news heavyweights, BuzzFeed and HuffPost, this week were rocked by a new wave of layoffs, a sign of an advertising-dependent economic model under threat.
At BuzzFeed, it was the second wave of job cuts in 14 months. In an internal announcement the company said that 200 jobs were to be shed, which follows the 100 jobs cut in the first round, out of a staff of 1,700 people.
Over at HuffPost, about 10 percent of journalists left editorial staff this week, or about 20 people in total.
No explanation was publicly given for the cuts, but the reasons are clear.
The HuffPost's parent company is Verizon Media (formerly Oath Inc), which owns other digital platforms such as AOL, Yahoo! and Verizon Media Services -- all of which are suffering job cuts.
"They were started pretty much with the idea of trying to assemble a great big audience and then sell advertising against those numbers," said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute.
But "Google and Facebook have grown into much, much more of an audience. And they're also better at gathering information and targeting people."
According to eMarketer forecasts, the search engine giant and the social network behemoth were set to capture 57.7 percent of advertising revenue in 2018, up sharply from 45.5 percent in 2011.
Another tech titan, Amazon, is gaining momentum and has just climbed to the numbers three spot.
"The free, ad-based model on which a lot of digital media projects are built is in jeopardy," warned Dan Kennedy, journalism professor at Northeastern University.
Edmonds believes that neither BuzzFeed nor HuffPost are in danger of disappearing. But their status is tarnished in the eyes of many tech investors accustomed to a double-digit annual growth.
The co-founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, who is also co-founder of the Huffington Post (now HuffPost), Jonah Peretti, sees a solution in a merger with one or more other market players.
He has publicly floated the ideas of merging Vice, Vox, Refinery29 and Group Nine, all "pure players," all internet media.
Each of them also advanced on the niche of video, but all have also been cutting staff in the past 18 months.
"You'll never hear me say that a merger makes sense," Kennedy said. "Two media organizations with problems do not solve them by combining into one larger organization with problems."
'Tough transition'
Another possibility is to change the business model to access other revenue streams.
BuzzFeed is doing this by launching a daily program on Twitter, a weekly one on Facebook, and another program on Netflix.
However, BuzzFeed does not seem ready to change its format to offer more specialized content -- the successful formula for other free information sites like Eater, Politico and Vulture.
Of course the nuclear option is still available: switching to a paywall system, a move that increasingly has become a necessity for online news.
"For any news-gathering operation to be dependent on advertising is perilous," said Christopher Daly, journalism professor at Boston University's College of Communication.
"From my study of history, I would say the only truly reliable source of funding for journalism is the audience. They are more reliable than advertisers, or wealthy patrons, or political parties, or any other source," Daly said.
In November, BuzzFeed launched a $5 monthly subscription plan that offers access to newsletters and additional content. The main site remains free.
"I think that's hard when you've gotten people used to it being free for so long," Edmonds said, referring to a possible paywall for BuzzFeed and HuffPost.
For Edmonds, the two news sites "both have journalism but it's a little bit mixed in with the lighter content on the side.
"I don't think people would pay much for that. That would be a difficult transition for them," he said.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
MANILA - An information technology law expert on Saturday said online news publication Rappler may not be cited for an alleged violation of the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 for an incident that happened months before it was signed into law.
Lawyer JJ Disini, a University of the Philippines College of Law professor, said a law may not apply on an alleged crime committed before it took effect.
"Ang hirap kasi d'yan, parang gumagawa sila ng batas para may kaso silang mai-file sa Rappler," said Disini said.
"Parang gumagawa sila ng bagong teorya ng batas para ma-filan nila ng case 'yung Rappler. Hindi ganun ka-solid 'yung case nila," said Disini.
On Thursday, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) summoned Rappler
CEO Maria Ressa and the site's former justice beat reporter Reynaldo
Santos Jr. to appear before its Cybercrime Division on Monday.
This as the NBI investigated a complaint filed by Century Peak president Wilfredo Keng against Rappler for an article published in May 2012.
In that article, Rappler reported that Keng allegedly lent a car to the late former Chief Justice Renato Corona. Corona allegedly used the car even while one of Keng's companies supposedly had a pending case in a lower court, the news site reported.
Keng had denied that Corona was using his car.
The complaint invoked provisions of the Cybercrime Prevention Act, which was signed into law on September 22, 2012, months after the publication of the Rappler report that Keng had found offensive.
Disini also cited the prescription period in filing criminal cases.
"Dapat one year lang, di ba? Dapat 2013 siya nag-file," Disini said.
The NBI meanwhile cited the theory of "continuous publication," making Rappler still liable for the crime.
The NBI investigation of Keng's complaint came shortly after the Securities and Exchange Commission revoked Rappler's incorporation papers, citing its alleged violation of foreign ownership regulations under the 1987 Constitution.
Rappler has asserted that it "remains 100-percent Filipino-owned" despite having foreign investors and slammed the SEC ruling as an assault on press freedom.
--With report from Michael Delizo, ABS-CBN News
source: news.abs-cbn.com
NEW YORK - Struggling online news site Mashable is set to be bought by Ziff Davis, a subsidiary of tech company j2 Global, a spokesman said Tuesday.
The once-vaunted outlet, which was valued at $250 million less than 2 years ago, will be sold for less than $50 million according to Recode, which first reported the acquisition.
Mashable has been in trouble for several months after failing to live up to huge growth rates it had promised investors.
Much of the decline is attributable to Google and Facebook's growing chokehold on the online advertising market.
The existence of talks between the 2 parties was reported by the Wall Street Journal last month.
Recode reported that Ziff Davis plans to ax around 50 positions and refocus Mashable on technology, which was its niche before it branched out to other areas including politics and pop culture.
Ziff Davis is known for managing several highly specialized sites including AskMen, PCMag and IGN in its 4 core areas of technology, gaming, healthcare, and shopping.
Mashable's founder Pete Cashmore, who started the site as a blog in 2005 when he was 19, will remain at the company.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
WASHINGTON - The US newspaper industry on Monday warned of a "duopoly" in online news by Google and Facebook, and called for legislation that would relax antitrust rules allowing collective negotiations with the internet giants.
The News Media Alliance said that because Google and Facebook dominate online news traffic digital advertising, "publishers are forced to surrender their content and play by their rules on how news and information is displayed, prioritized and monetized."
A statement by the association of some 2,000 media groups said news organizations "are limited with disaggregated negotiating power against a de facto duopoly that is vacuuming up all but an ever-decreasing segment of advertising revenue."
The group, formerly known as the Newspaper Association of America, includes large dailies like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal as well as hundreds of smaller media groups and regional news organizations.
The request comes amid a prolonged slump in traditional print news, as readers increasingly turn to online platforms.
News Media Alliance president David Chavern, writing in a Wall Street Journal commentary, said that the internet platforms "distort the flow of economic value derived from good reporting."
He said Google and Facebook account for more than 70 percent of the $73 billion spent each year on digital advertising, and they eat up most of the growth, with nearly 80 percent of all online referral traffic coming from the two firms.
"But the two digital giants don't employ reporters. They don’t dig through public records to uncover corruption, send correspondents into war zones, or attend last night’s game to get the highlights," Chavern said.
"They expect an economically squeezed news industry to do that costly work for them."
Facebook and Google, which share some revenue with news organizations on certain platforms, have been stepping up efforts to help media groups with grants and other programs.
Facebook's head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, said in a statement to AFP: "We're committed to helping quality journalism thrive on Facebook. We're making progress through our work with news publishers and have more work to do."
Google said in a statement: "We want to help news publishers succeed as they transition to digital. In recent years we've built numerous specialized products and technologies, developed specifically to help distribute, fund, and support newspapers."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
