Oliver Twist moment of media

NEW DELHI: Last week, the Digital News Publishers Association held its annual conference in New Delhi to draw attention to the vice-like hold global news aggregators like Google, Facebook et al. have over the news industry in India, to the detriment of legacy media companies and possibly India’s democratic process too.

Their case in a nutshell is this: The news media gather and process news at great expense from all corners of the country, employing thousands of journalists who risk body and soul.

By aggregating this content, Big Tech platform companies earn the lion’s share of advertising revenue while running none of that risk and copping none of that cost.

The DNPA is an industry lobby of 17 major digital companies, most of them affiliated to legacy media businesses.

In their complaint against global news aggregators, they are at one with the Indian Newspaper Society, which represents the print industry’s interests.

Together they believe that Google, the biggest aggregator, uses its algorithms and advertising tech heft to unilaterally decide the share to be paid to publishers for content created by them.

They want the publisher’s share of advertising revenue to be raised to 85 per cent.

In the past, Google’s generic defence to similar complaints worldwide was that it sends 24 billion searches to news sites every month, which bring new audiences to publishers who then make money by way of advertising and subscriptions.

“On average… news publishers keep over 95 percent of the digital advertising revenue they generate when they use Ad Manager to show ads on their websites,” according to a 2020 blog post by Google’s VP for news, Richard Gingras.

Whatever the numbers, one can see that the equation between news publishers and Google is a bit like the plight of the milk producers of Gujarat before Verghese Kurien came along. You poured your produce and took the pittance.

The Centre has pledged to side with the Indian media in its tussle with the Big Tech majors.

Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar said at the NDPA conclave last week that the upcoming Digital India Act will address the disproportionate power that ad-tech companies and aggregation platforms hold over publishers.

This is welcome, particularly the minister’s pointed reference to protecting the interests of small publishers.

“It is not really the right thing for a country like ours where we have potentially hundreds of thousands of small content creators…” Chandrasekhar said.

This comes at a time when digital publishers and their legacy media principals are being buffeted by the blizzards of change, made worse by the pandemic.

Print revenues from advertising and circulation stagnated from 2015 to 2019 and plunged steeply in the pandemic year.

Both revenue streams are forecast to fall further—advertising by 40 per cent and circulation by 20 per cent—by 2026.

While digital advertising is expected to grow, over a small base, there is likely to be a 20-25 per cent revenue gap media companies would have to contend with.

According to a 2021 report by Dalberg Advisors, commissioned by Google itself, there was a 78 per cent fall in employment in the media and publishing industry in India between 2016 and 2021.

This reflects the huge cutbacks media companies have had to make in their investments on news gathering.

The consequences of this shrinkage are already evident in the proliferation of fake news.

It’s a poignant irony that legacy media’s reputation should be the subject of social media ridicule when its plight is so parlous.