This time, i think big tech may be right

The upstarts ate the legacy publishers' lunch, so no more "rivers of gold" from classified and display advertising.

A similar thing happened to broadcast media as well.

But then the media companies trundled on, devaluing their news product by offering it for free on the internet and hoping to make a living from advertising.

This worked for a while, but there was no shortage of advertising inventory on the internet, so the price of advertising was bid down and down to the point where that model was broken.

Now most of them publish behind paywalls using either a premium model, where all content has to be paid for, or the freemium model, where some content is free, but most isn't.

This is a further argument against digital platforms paying for content-the publishers themselves can choose what is too valuable to give away, and what isn't. They could make it impossible for social media platforms to carry any of their product.

But the underlying problem is this

Media organisations have a problem when it comes to the value of their product. This can be demonstrated no better than by our recent experiences during COVID.

If you wanted to know the real truth, social media and alternative publishing sites like Substack were far more accurate and timely than the mainstream media, which merely regurgitated government talking points.

Even now, for example, where is the discussion in mainstream media of the fact that life expectancy has dropped post-pandemic by two or three years? Or that vaccine injuries are far greater than have been officially revealed?

When News Corp Australasia's Michael Miller says "communities will be at risk of not receiving the quality local news they deserve, and our democracy as a whole will suffer," what he is really saying is, "If we can't find someone else to tax to boost our profits, we're screwed."

And then when he says, "It will also, sadly, fuel the explosion of fake news and other junk proliferating on social media," what he means is, "Our biggest problem is we're not even producing what people want or need to read and they're finding it elsewhere."

I'm not a big fan of Meta's corporate practices, but in this case they're right, and it will be to the benefit of everyone because it will either force legacy media to reform and produce a product people want to pay for, or it will make room for alternative publishers who can.