Associate Professor James Meese has a new book out called Digital Platforms and the Press, which explores the risks associated with a platform-dependent press. It’s free to read through open access.

Platform dependence is a term used to describe a situation where a business or sector is reliant on platforms for key business functions, like distribution or monetization.

This definition might bring you back to the heady days of the mid-2010s when news outlets across the world were rushing to put their content on social media, and start-ups like Buzzfeed were producing content tailor made for these new platforms and their millennial audiences.

But why is platform dependence still a problem today? Even though social media remains an important distribution channel for some outlets, lots of news media companies are now valuing subscriptions over traffic numbers (and some clever companies never drank the social media Kool-Aid).

The book’s argument is that even though the sector is doing its best to reduce its dependence on audience traffic from social media, journalism is still dependent on digital platforms in several ways.

While a lot of discussion has focused on the news media’s reliance on traffic from social media, there has been much less attention paid to Google’s dominance of the advertising supply chain. In Digital Platforms and the Press, we see that a lot of the sector remains dependent on Google for advertising revenue. Google also appears to be able to successfully able to limit competition from other advertising networks. These long-standing rumours around Google’s anti-competitive conduct are currently being tested by the U.S. Department of Justice in an active antitrust case.

The book also anticipates some of the challenges the news media sector is currently facing in the ongoing standoff with digital platforms around mandatory payments. Meta has let agreements under the News Media Bargaining Code lapse and are not interested in renewing deals. While Google has been a more amiable partner to Australian news businesses, they would clearly prefer to not be regulated, as seen through their recent navigation of similar legislation in Canada.

The collapse of the already strained relationship between platforms and news companies and the weakness of the supporting legislation has led to devastating redundancies across the sector. However, it also shows that the news media sector has established dependencies around these payments in a short space of time. The book argues that rather than saving the news media sector, these payments may just reinforce inequitable relationships between platforms and the news sector.

Getting platforms to pay for news is still a possible solution but a direct tax is looking like a more viable option. Predicting some of the challenges with the bargaining code Digital Platforms and the Press considers other solutions available to rescue journalism from platform power. These include introducing competition in the advertising supply chain, building our capacity to observe what sort of content circulates on digital platforms, and thinking about platforms beyond the usual targets of Google and Facebook.

Platform dependence is a complex issue and not every news organisation is completely dependent on Facebook or Google. However, with platforms involved in everything from content distribution and advertising to more opaque systems like cloud storage, it’s almost impossible to run an entirely separate business. Digital Platforms and the Press offers an overview of how this dependence plays out and highlights the long-term economic and social consequences for the news sector.

The above is an extract from 'Digital Platforms and the Press' by Associate Professor James Meese. Intellect, 2023.