Forcing Facebook and Google to pay for news could lead to uncritical reporting on tech; better approaches would tackle roots of media woes, including ad markets
Exponent — as promised! — will be back tomorrow, talking about podcasting, Spotify, and working from home. — On to the update: Tweets: @raju , @jason_kint , @jarroddicker , @dkiesow , @mattyglesias , @kerrymflynn , @jeffjarvis , @mdudas , @jeffjarvis , @kristianstout , @modestproposal1 , and @kerrymflynn See also Mediagazer Tweets: Raju Narisetti / @raju : thoughtful criticism of the (often but not always deserved finger-pointing) of @google and @facebook by newly ailing news brands and knee-jerkers: Media, Regulators, and Big Tech; Indulgences and Injunctions; Better Approaches, Ben Thompson @stratechery https://stratechery.com/... @jason_kint : A “journalism professor” labeling as “brilliant” a few lines stating Google doesn't monetize Google News is a bit much for me. Thompson's piece wasn't all that. If google didn't exist that traffic would all still happen to publishers. Google is a utility monopoly. Duh. https://twitter.com/... @jarroddicker : The future of creator monetization is Faceless Infrastructure. Creators focus on creating. The rest is a (shared) service. Phase 1: CMS scaled & offered as a service Phase 2: Monetization tech scaled & offered as a service Seeing this w/ @zeus, @tryscroll, @SubstackInc etc. https://twitter.com/... Damon Kiesow / @dkiesow : The majority of tech platform “fixes” for journalism are products and features the platforms themselves build and profit from. Which is like polluting the rivers and then selling co-branded bottled water. Matthew Yglesias / @mattyglesias : Journalism is dying, journalism has a lot of social value, and Google/Facebook have a lot of money so it kind of makes sense to think “maybe platforms should be paying money to media content companies” but unfortunately the economics don't make sense. https://stratechery.com/... @kerrymflynn : In the second half of the email, Vice CEO Nancy Dubuc seems to blame the company's financial situation on “Big Tech.” “Platforms are not just taking a larger slice of the pie, but almost the whole pie.” Wonder if she read Stratchery's post yesterday: https://stratechery.com/... Jeff Jarvis / @jeffjarvis : @dkiesow @benthompson My thread here: https://twitter.com/... I've long argued that instead of handouts (which disappear like dandelions in the wind) the platforms would better help us with strategic understanding of the net and how we should work in it. Mike Dudas / @mdudas : “It is in the interest of multiple sides of the media market — publishers, readers, developers, curators & regulators — to create mechanisms that let publishers of all types + sizes build new kinds of monetization opps that don't depend on FB and GOOG” https://stratechery.com/... Jeff Jarvis / @jeffjarvis : Yes, bless @benthompson's rebuttal to @benyt's regurgitation of the Murdoch company line and willful ignorance of net history. Excerpt below. My thread here: https://twitter.com/... Thompson's piece (pay wall) here: https://stratechery.com/... https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Kristian Stout / @kristianstout : Great post from @benthompson - the news media need the platforms more than vice versa. The real question to me is why not enough people care to visit the newspapers sites directly. Answering that question is the real key to fixing the news biz imo https://twitter.com/... Modest Proposal / @modestproposal1 : .@benthompson writes: “media organizations have to be honest with themselves about why they are struggling, and in that accounting Facebook and Google are beneficiaries of inevitable Internet trends, not creators.” https://twitter.com/... @kerrymflynn : .@benthompson's new rebuttal to @benyt's column on big tech paying media companies, published outside Stratechery's paywall: “...any sort of rational evaluation would suggest that money should flow in the opposite direction” https://stratechery.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Ben Thompson's argument lands mid-arc: [[a:953551|Australian and French regulators are already moving to make tech companies pay publishers for news]], and News Corp has since signed a multi-year global deal with Google that does exactly that — significant payments from Google in exchange for content. Thompson's warning is about what those deals buy beyond cash.
His claim sits against a decade of Stratechery skepticism about platform power, including his reading of Zuckerberg's manifesto as a sign Facebook's power should be checked — so this is not a defense of Big Tech so much as an argument that mandated payments treat symptoms while leaving the ad-market mechanics that hollowed out publishing intact.
First-order effects
- Publishers signing payment deals like News Corp's gain revenue now, but per Thompson they take on a conflict: outlets funded by Google and Facebook have weakened incentives to report critically on them.
- Media figures who blame the platforms for capturing a disproportionate share of advertising revenue — the camp Thompson is engaging here — see payment mandates as restitution, not capture, setting up the immediate fault line between the two positions.
Second-order effects
- [[a:963473|Facebook's Australia news ban showed platforms will surrender money to appease regulators before they surrender control of their platforms]], so payment regimes shift the fight onto distribution terms publishers don't set.
- Platforms can also simply deprioritize news afterward: Meta later reallocated resources away from Facebook's News tab and Bulletin, which erodes the traffic value of any licensing deal publishers bargained for.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, news economics become tethered to bilateral platform deals struck regulator by regulator — a structure where the largest publishers extract payments while smaller outlets remain dependent on the same distribution and ad infrastructure.
- Thompson's alternative points the other way: policy aimed at ad markets and monetization infrastructure would attack the root cause, whereas payment mandates institutionalize the platforms' gatekeeper position even as they fund it.
The trend: Regulators are converting platform-news disputes into licensing-payment regimes country by country, even as platforms keep control of distribution and the underlying ad-market problem goes unaddressed.