August 28, 2023
Last week saw another lap around the Meta news throttle oval.
Not a great deal has changed. The new Heritage Minister Pascal St.-Onge invited local Meta spokespersons for a chat and St.-Onge emerged with an upbeat message on breaking the impasse over Bill C-18 and Big Tech payments for news content. Meta did not, sticking to its “repeal the Bill or else” messaging.
As the weeks go by, the government will continue to harvest the news cycle windfall of Meta catching important news sources and public interest information in its news throttle net. Meta’s blackout of wildfire news stories is embarrassing for the company, as are the latest throttles of a Facebook page spotlighting inadequate palliative care and another page belonging to an American online literary journal run by Canadian ex-pats.
In the latter case Meta is learning a new lesson: don’t mess with literary journals. The Globe caught some zinger quotes from page owner Matthew Friedman who described the news throttle “as a form of corporate gunboat diplomacy” because Meta “wants to make an example of Canada. They want to put out this fire before it runs out of control. This is corporate colonialism.”
Facts.
None of this back and forth appears to be changing the battle lines drawn on C-18. However a significant development that must affect the strategic choices of all concerned is the out-of-left-field CRTC announcement that its pre-implementation consultation on Bill C-18 will stretch out a full 18 months until early 2025, when bargaining for news payments will only begin.
Another C-18 development flying under the radar was an academic study published in Switzerland with the support of news publishers. The point of the study can be traced back to the origins of the Australian New Media Bargaining Code as a public remedy to a private Big Tech duopoly in news distribution over Search (Google) and social media (Facebook and Instagram).
These studies are published from time to time, backed either by Big Tech or news publishers, so take them with a grain of salt. Also, they can’t be run on large data sets since those belong to the platforms and they aren’t sharing. Instead these studies are self described experiments. In this recent case 1,573 Swiss respondents looked for information on Google Search but also on a re-engineered mock-up that eliminated news sources.
The Swiss study concludes that news is of value to search engines, it generates advertising for search engines, and —the money shot— a series of industry benchmarks on the sharing of advertising revenue suggests that in a competitive market news publishers ought to get 40% of Google’s ad revenue associated with information searches. The study doesn’t use YouTube’s advertising revenue split as a benchmark, but the Google-owned hosting platform compensates YouTuber creators with 55% of the ad revenue associated with their viewership.
Quick math, that’s $233 million in Google payments to news outlets in a country with 8.5 million population.
You can request a copy of the study here.
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The strike of editorial and creative staff of Television Ontario is a week old.
The English-language public broadcaster of public programming and educational content is a shadow of its former self after years of funding neglect and layoffs by provincial governments of all stripes. Steve Paikin’s news magazine The Agenda remains its flagship.
Wages have fallen behind the cost of living by about 30% in the last 10 years, accelerated by TVO being caught in the widely cast net of Premier Doug Ford’s public service wage controls (now ruled unconstitutional but under appeal).
Another sticking point is a concession demanded by the management-side: deleting a long standing contract clause that puts a two-year time clock on temporary positions before they become permanent. It’s a clause found in several mature media collective agreements. If removing this clause really is a sticking point (and not just a hostage taken by management because of the strike over wages) it’s probably a sign that TVO doesn’t want to be candid with their political masters about employee headcount.
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Bell is terminating its 28-year patronage of the Toronto International Film Festival. According to various reports, the funding is worth $5 million per year. Bell’s name and logo will come off of TIFF’s downtown headquarters within the year. This September’s festival will be the last with Bell’s resources just as TIFF has emerged from the Covid crisis and run smack into the Hollywood talent strike.
There is a helpful background piece from Etan Vlessing in the Hollywood Reporter. It would be interesting to know exactly when Bell made this decision (apparently “earlier this year”). Like the mass layoffs it announced in June, Bell’s retreat from TIFF has a touch of political theatre for the benefit of the CRTC and perhaps the rest of us too. Any observer will remark on the trifling amount of money involved for Canada’s largest media company. Maybe Netflix will step in.
There is a conceptual segue here from the TIFF story to the topic of the corporate cross-subsidies we have come to expect (and the CRTC has enforced) in media. I recommend a recent blog post from Mark Goldberg who is a telecommunications consultant with a flair for reminding us of what’s what.
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