SYDNEY, 14 May 2020:
An Australian media group today estimated tech giants like Google and Facebook should pay the country’s media around A$600 million annually for the news they publish.
Last month, the Australian government ordered the creation of a mandatory code of conduct that should cover issues such as data exchange, classification and display of news, payment and exchange of income generated from the news publication by the tech giants.
Australian media group Nine Entertainment chairman Peter Costello told The Australian Financial Review that under this mandatory code of conduct, which should be ready by July, Google and Facebook should pay 10% of the revenue they earn from publishing the news.
“We think that Google and Facebook are driving advertising revenue of about A$6 billion in Australia, and roughly 10% of that is as a result of news content,” said the head of one of the country’s biggest media groups.
“So, if you apply those figures, Google and Facebook are taking about A$600 million of advertising revenue out (…) which otherwise could have, or should have, been going to media,” said Costello, who has formerly served as Australia’s treasurer.
This amount has been calculated based on investigations by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which must deliver the code of conduct next July, on the news content in searches, not on Google News, and by Facebook News Feed users.
The ACCC determined in its final report on digital platforms published in December 2019 that they accounted for 51% of advertising expenditure in 2017 in the Oceanic country.
These platforms had doubled their share in the previous five years at the expense of print publications, which in the same period went from 33% to 12% of spending.
Facebook, the most popular social network in Australia, has 17 million monthly users in the country, 68% of its population, while Instagram – the second with most followers and owned by Facebook – has 11 million more.
Google accumulated 90% of search traffic from computers in Australia in 2017 and 98% from mobile phones.
Australia, like other organisations and governments around the world, are concerned about how Facebook and Google attract most digital advertising revenue in a space where they are not the owners of the news material they post.
– EFE