On Monday, February 26, 2024, the Center for Journalism and Liberty at Open Markets Institute convened leading experts in media, economics, and competition policy – as well as a news publisher representative – to discuss ways to more fairly and accurately value news content on digital platforms. Determining a fairer and more accurate value for news is one important way we can help preserve journalism as countries and states look to policies to make Big Tech and AI companies pay for the news they use.
First, we agreed on the severe limits of today’s most common methods for calculating how news is consumed online, referral traffic, which fails to reflect the true value of news to tech companies. But, as CJL Director and moderator, Dr. Courtney Radsch pointed out: “This method for valuing the news disregards the way news content improves the platforms for users, even if they don’t click on a headline.”
Indeed, our experts’ research, scholarship, and policy-making experience all point to findings that news content, even without click-through, is far more valuable to online platforms, like Google search and Facebook, than the platforms themselves admit:
Behavioral economics researcher Alexis Johann spoke about his findings that internet users in Switzerland (as a sample) are more satisfied with online search results – and find search results more “successful” – when those results include news content. Meaning: People trust Google search results largely thanks to credible news sources that make up a part of those results. Their study estimates that 40% of the advertising revenue from informational searches on Google should go to news publishers.
Dr. Anya Schiffrin and her co-authors published a new methodology, extrapolated from the Switzerland study, for determining the monetary amount websites and search engines like Facebook and Google owe news publishers. In Australia and Canada, publishers have negotiated deals of between $100- $200 million with tech platforms. However, Dr. Schiffrin and her colleagues estimate that fair compensation for publishers “is in the billions, not millions” annually (and specifically for US news publishers, $12-$14 billion annually).
Antitrust expert Dr. Cristina Caffarra was involved in the development of Australia’s bargaining code between publishers and platforms. She, like Dr. Schiffrin, have observed that legally-binding bargaining requirements between news publishers and platforms can dramatically reduce the existing power imbalance in the platforms’ favor. But better, fairer ways to value news content are needed, as Dr. Caffarra noted.
Ermela Hoxha works on platform partnerships with the news publisher, The Guardian. She emphasized a lack of leverage for news publishers because so much of the data about how people engage with content lives with the platforms, not the publishers, which often refuse to share such data. Instead, there needs to be better, fairer ways to come to agreements with platforms on the value of news, particularly as news content has become so important to credibly training new AI models:
"None of that traffic will go back to publishers,” Hoxha said of generative AI’s large language models, adding urgency to the need to more accurately value news and get publishers the compensation they are owed. The Center for Journalism and Liberty has raised similar warnings, including in our comments on content ownership and AI to the U.S. Copyright Office.
The February 26th webinar largely focused on methods for 1. better valuing the news, and 2. creating the conditions for news publishers to bargain more equally with the platforms.
However, “bargaining codes,” are only one part of a range of solutions needed to save the news. These include structural separation between platforms and adjacent lines of business, such as cloud and advertising, antitrust enforcement to mitigate self-preferencing and other forms of unfair competition, as well as philanthropy and public policy support.
We’ve allowed internet platforms to come between news organizations and the ad revenues they relied on to remain solvent. As more than half the world’s population hold elections this year, preserving independent news to protect democracy must be a top priority of government and civil society here in the US and around the world.
Critically and in conclusion, Ermela Hoxha invoked upcoming elections around the world to emphasize the importance of better valuing and sustaining the news:
“This is about society going forward.”
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