Wednesday 2nd September: Facebook threatens to ban news content in Australia

September 02, 2020

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Esther.

Google has been on the offensive about this Australian legislation for weeks, but Facebook has been uncharacteristically quiet. Now, they've gone nuclear.

In a blog post dropped to US media, Facebook has threatened to ban Australian users from sharing local or international news content on Facebook and Instagram if the federal government goes ahead with its planned bargaining code legislation.

“Assuming this draft code becomes law, we will reluctantly stop allowing publishers and people in Australia from sharing local and international news on Facebook and Instagram,” Facebook's Australian MD Will Easton said.

“This is not our first choice – it is our last. But it is the only way to protect against an outcome that defies logic and will hurt, not help, the long-term vibrancy of Australia’s news and media sector.”

Once again, we hit the inevitable stage of the tech giants threatening to switch off or restrict operations in a country who is trying to apply legislative pressure (remember France and the snippet tax?). And it's publishers who end up caught in the middle.

Talking of getting caught in the middle, anyone hoping the digital services tax would squeeze more revenue out of the tech giants will be disappointed today. Google is passing on the cost of its 2% digital tax in the UK to advertisers (and taking similar measures elsewhere in Europe), Amazon is passing it on to marketplace sellers, and eBay have announced they are absorbing it. Updates from Facebook and Microsoft to follow.

Despite having been through the mill this year, Quartz has had a considerable increase in its base of paying subscribers. It recently reached 21,000 paying members, up from 11,000 in November 2019. John McCarthy talks to Quartz president Katie Weber about how they've achieved this, from fattening up their membership product to focusing on its coronavirus email newsletter.

Rafat Ali argues that Zoom is the Napster of the event industry. All types of business event are in danger of their revenues streams of tickets, sponsorships, memberships, and other types of fees being eroded as the world gets used to digital formats. It's not that physical events will die, but the underlying economics have changed forever.

New episode!

(Sort of. The full Media Voices podcast starts back next Monday.)

Peter has been working really hard over August, editing down hours of interviews with our Publisher Podcast Award winners. We'll be releasing a new mini-episode every Wednesday, and first up is Terri White talking about launching, evolving and monetising the Pilot TV podcast.

We've written quite a few pieces over the break, and are going to do our best to continue as normal episode production ramps back up. If you want to have a look through our analysis archives, including things the three of us have written for other sites, you'll find it all here.