While media companies are looking to renew the News Media Bargaining Code, Meta has decided to discontinue its investment in Australian news.
👉 Background: Back in 2021, the media industry and big tech came to an agreement on the News Media Bargaining Code after a testy couple of weeks. It's believed Google and Meta ended up paying news organisations around $200 million per year for access to their content.
👉 What happened: This agreement is now coming to an end. While the media companies are looking to renew this deal, Meta has decided that it will not continue its $65 million per year investment in Australian news.
👉 What else: In fact, the Facebook News tab in Australia will be removed starting April. This highlights the difficulty of commercialising news content in Australia.
💡 Content monetisation has become one of the critical concerns for digital platforms. While newsrooms want to be fairly remunerated for their news content, it needs to be commercially useful for the buyers too.
💡Meta's rejection highlights a harsh reality: it's really hard to monetise news content. The number of people using the Facebook News tab in Australia has dropped by 80% in the last year, according to Meta.
💡 For Meta, it seems like this isn't commercially justifiable anymore. But this might leave a big hole in the pockets of media publishers.
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