A detailed look at Australian advertising flows has answered the question: did Google kill old media? The answer? Yes — but not the one you think. No, not newspapers. It killed the old Yellow Pages — that analogue resource that used to land with a thud on your front porch once a year, jam-packed with paid-for listings.
In pre-Google days, “Business Directories” like the Yellow Pages were one of the three big categories of advertising, along with display and classifieds. The least sexy of the trio — the least Mad Men — it turned over about $800 million in 2002; a large chunk into Telstra’s bottom line, or about 10% of the-then $8.9 billion Australian ad market.
The Yellow Pages. Every household had one. It even brought its own form of “Search Engine Optimisation”: Start your business name with an “A” (maybe “Aardvark” or better, “AAA”) and you were guaranteed to come up top of your preferred category!)
Hard to believe that search turned out to be a better way of putting buyers and sellers together. Search, dominated by Google, ate the directories’ business and more than quadrupled its revenues to $3.6 billion by 2018, or about 22% of a much larger $16.6 billion ad market.
Newspapers, meanwhile, were shedding classified revenues: dropping from about $1.5 billion in 2002 to about $200 million in 2018, according to the AlphaBeta Media Landscape Trends report being released this weekend. (Most figures in this article are from this report which was commissioned by Google.)
This accounts for 92% of newspaper revenue declines over this period. Where did they go? To specialist online sites, the biggest owned by News Corp or Nine (as Bernard Keane wrote in Crikey on Wednesday).
Dubbed “rivers of gold” by Rupert Murdoch, classified ads were inseparable from the print newspaper product — and, so, inseparable from news. On the internet? Not so much. They have been in real long-term decline, with each recession or downturn since the 1970s taking a bite and each subsequent up-turn taking revenues to a lower real peak than the previous one.
The four key categories of classifieds have each found their own home online: property to realestate.com.au (62% owned by News Corp) and Domain (60% owned by Nine), cars to carsales.com.au, jobs to Seek and household trading to Gumtree, Ebay and Facebook marketplace (where it’s now largely free). The shift to the internet has seen volume boom, while prices have shrunk.
Still a good business. In June, UBS estimated that News Corp’s holding in the REA Group makes up about 88% of the value of its market capitalisation of about $10 billion. In that context, who owns whom? To avoid this sort of cannibalisation, Fairfax famously dodged investments in online classified companies like Seek in the early century. Great plan.
With regional and community closures, the final few million in print classified revenues are slipping away. After COVID-19, expect them to be all but gone.
The mastheads, meanwhile, have largely held on to their display ad revenues in nominal dollars, thanks to a shift to online ads. In 2002 they banked $1.6 billion, just about all through print. In 2018, it was $1.7 billion, $500 million of it digital. The AlphaBeta report estimates that this gives the mastheads about 29% of regular (that is, non-social) display revenues.
There’s a trap here: Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report (from the US) has been warning for about a decade that, over time, advertising share correlates with attention. According to the ACCC Digital Platforms report last year, Australians spent about 2.3% of time online on news sites. What would Dickens’ Micawber say? Revenues 29%. Attention 2.3%. Result: misery.
COVID-19 is hurrying that misery along, with the vanishing of the travel display ads which seemed owned by the mastheads just last February.
Social media ads — a category that didn’t exist in 2002 — has exploded to revenues of about $1.5 billion, two-thirds of it to Facebook (and about a third of that to Instagram).
So, if Google and Facebook didn’t take the ads from newspapers, why are old media leaning on the federal government to shake them down for a share? Same reason robbers hit banks: that’s where the money is.
the sooner news limited, sky news, seven west media and the nine media network bite the dust the better and that goes for the rabid radio 2GB as well.
Totally with you. They lost their social license to trade (mis)information years ago.
And who or what should replace them – both as news sources and advertising media?
I don’t read any hard copy daily newspaper, but I do read (and pay for) half a dozen of them online. Yes, their selection of what counts as news is narrow, but probably less narrow that the echo chambers most people seem to rely on online.
You must have noticed that, over the past couple of decades, far more people are complaining of their fellow-citizens that “these people just don’t have a clue”, or “they just don’t live in the real world”. What they are telling me is that they are in a silo of their own making and people in the other silos are seriously deficient in their view of what is happening and what is significant.
Twenty-five years ago, men going to work in factories had a copy of The Sun (Melbourne) or the Tele (Sydney) rolled up in their back pockets and they couldn’t avoid the headlines. They could dismiss the headlines, but they couldn’t ignore them. At morning tea they would unroll their papers, browse them and share the stories, sports results and comics with their mates. Now I find many people totally ignorant of major issues, especially events overseas.
The New York Times and the BBC, for example, maintain bureaux here in Australia. No YouTube opinionator does that. But what the YouTube opinionator does do is quote and comment on “mainstream media”. If there was no mainstream media to parasitise, the bloviators would be lost. Indeed, where would Crikey be if it did not draw on and comment on mainstream sources? We’d get fed even more undergraduate-level existential introspection. It’s easy to condemn the Murdoch press, but at least they have SOME authority, more authority than any YouTube or Facebook source that declares itself to be independent, but which would wither without access – directly or indirectly – to mainstream sources.
Keith, you are arguing a position that once had some substance, and that’s why the better faith elements of the legacy meeja is still deploying – essentially out of ‘muscle memory’. (The bad faith elements, like those engaged in this fight with Google/FB, are as ever just commercial opportunists who have always routinely exploited ‘vocational journalism’ arguments – free speech, democratic plurality, jobs for journalists (even as they themselves sack ’em in droves), etc – for competitive gain. I have some sympathy myself still for the line you take, being of a certain age and cultural inclination. But in this post-internet you could not be more wrong:
Gah, apologies fo the poor self-editing and patchy cut-n-pasting in that reply, Keith. The missing bit was something like this:
“And increasingly, we don’t need ANY journalism to be thus, given that…we can now seek out and easily source information directly ourselves, from technical, bureacrtic, academic, statistical, public service departments and political websites (of all countering politcal and issue positions), peaj body and advocacy groups, local community and protest groups, etc etc…it’s nevre been easier to be super informaed…and Google especially (and social media comnnectivity more generally) is a hugely important part of that information functionality. Not least becasue it plugs the ‘legacy’ media, too, into that hierarchical information tree by which I can become super wellinstant link-listings from Mr Google which includes legacy media – ABC, SBS, Nine, Seven News, 60 Minutes, News Limited and many international mastehads – but also a journalism body pages, a commemorative page, several academic articles (UNSW) and links, Parliament House links to MP speeches, peak body articles, etc etc. In other words, a genuine plurality of inforrmations about those guys and what happened to them – right across the spectrum from Pilgerish left to Murdochian right, etc. And with an hour or so of readsing, I’ll be as well informed about Greg Shackleton & Co as anyone might reasonably need to be.
But ONLY if I want to. And ONLY if…those professional journo sources don’t get themselves kicked out of the algorythmic sandpit, for being bratty sooks.
Keith, I think there is a conspiracy (of my own ineptitude) afoot. Missing bits in my missing bits:
“(…super well )….informed. If I plug ‘The Balibo Five’ into Teh InterWebz, for example, I get pages of…(instant link-listings from Mr Google…etc)”
Precisely. And another excellent reminder of the perversely hypocritical – ultimately, untenable – exceptionalism of ‘news’ media. Apparently there’s something unique about that sub-sector of information commerce, that licenses legacy companies to demand government regulation to defy the laws of information supply-and-demand. The Yellow Pages business model collapsed because someone/technology came up with a better mercantile model. Now newspapers’ and broadcast TV’s business model has collapsed, because technology/someone has come up with a better mercantile model.
Ah, but…
The exceptionalist hook is…’journalism’. What. Is. It?? What is this ‘news’ that Google and FB must suddenly stump up for? And what is ‘not’ news, that need not be stumped up for…? No-one can say. Except that…oh, rest assured that it’s fantastic information. It’s unique information. Ah, ‘journalism’, so fantastically unique! How my heart thumps for thee, yes, O, elusive muse, O cocquetish vocational tingle, O naughty little frisson of exclusive credentialism…etc etc, blah blah, O ‘Journalism’, O ‘News’, O ‘Enlightened Debate’…t’is all so very unbelievably, incredibly, uniquely, amaaaazingly-amazingballs double secret special probation excellently groovy super duper wondrous special sauce information…that Its Survival Is Vital – VITAL, I tells ya – to Our Very Human Existence!!!!! Yes, landsakes almighty ho, punters…without the (bloatedly overpaid) information value-adding of our professional Info-Geenyuses – Andrew Bolt, Paul Kelly, Peter Fitzsimons, Peter Hartcher, Peter Peter the Hack-Space Eater, Milly McMillennial-Twitter with her 34s PTC platitude cross, Drony McFaded-Boomer-Lothario’s daily turgid Op Ed reheat from 1984 – we’d all be ROOONED!!!!!!!!!!
Really. This entire hillbilly chancers’ farce would be a hillbilly chancers’ farce, if not for the hillbilly chancers’ farce that is our farcical hillbilly politicians and farcical hillbilly ACCC giving the Three Hillbilly Chancers-in-Chief – Rupert, Stokesy and Peter Costello – a jot of credence.
Your dyspeptic Ode to Ink Stained Scribblers suggest the first pages of Keats’ LAMIA.
Journalism is, amusingly, somewhat circularly and self-servingly defined, as being that which is produced by organizations who can get themselves “professionally registered” by the APC (Australian Press Council (Murdoch?)) or the IMC (Independent Media Council (Stokes?)), via the ACMA.gov.au.
News is all-encompasingly defined as: “any other content that is created by a journalist which is relevant to recording, investigating or explaining issues of interest to Australians.”
So. Just keep track of all the registered “journalists”, and what they produce, and you’ll know what the “news” is…
Got it, AR.
So……who do I talk to about getting paid for these comments?
You have to already be making more than $150k/yr from it in the first place…
Once you cross that hurdle, I expect that there’ll probably be an(other) organization to register with.
Ah…
*light goes on*
That explains the double page, baby sh*t yellow Clive Palmer spreads in The Oz, then. Without the Lofty Seriousness & Democracy Salving Credibility – AKA the gutter-slewing bags of nicked loot – imbued by it to our Legacy Fourth…I expect the deathless prose of your Paul Kelly, Greg Sheridan, Maurice Newman crew would be just more piles of incontinent, delusional, ranting inanity. You know, like you and me here on Teh Evil Interwebz churn out.
Makes perfect sense now.
My Yellow pages is now wildly out of date but still used, especially the local one, for finding “that old bloke we used last time” and similar.
It’s a portable, solar powered, random access date base and, like a dictionary or encyclopaedia (if anyone remembers those) allows one to find things not sought.
As did the card indexes in libraries, a sad day when they were abolished.
The Yellow Pages still have a place in our society albeit diminished.
An elderly neighbour was recently unable to phone her doctor as she’d mislaid the address book with his number. Unfortunately her son had visited a few months earlier &, without asking, had turfed her White pages & Yellow pages phonebooks as he deemed them useless. The neighbour didn’t have access to the internet ergo she was stumped.
Some people are falling through 21st century cracks.
The harsh fact that ‘journalism’ and ‘journalists’ need to grasp is that the vast majority of human beings have no interest in its collective or their individual product. Never have, don’t now, never will. For a brief period, this weird hybrid information form – ‘journalism’, which no-one has ever or can satisfactorily describe, define, differentiate or delineate in comparison to all other information forms – was able to dupe the rest of us into according it special privileges, based on the banality of commercial and technical alignment: advertising + mass printing production/distribution + tech-specialised free-to-air mass broadcasting. That was the fleeting (always-teetering) pedestal to and upon which journalism’s claims to information superiority rose and briefly rested. That’s gone now. We can all broadcast our pearls of wisdom to the world now. We can all plaster our words for all posterity.
‘Journalism’ needs to stop trying to protect its information hegemony by regulation, bullying, lofty disdain and – especially – stupid Faustian deals with material world power. And just focus on making its information as fit-for-purpose and competitive in the Information Age free-for-all as it can. Chrs Keith.