Hey you Publisher… Unite!

Something significant happened this week. Something historic and something, that I believe, would alter the world of publishing!

You must all have read about the standoff between Google and Australian government and about how google threatened to stop it’s search services in Australia.

What Australian regulators want is to make google and facebook pay the publishers for the news content that they use.

Something that should have happened long, long ago. One hears that on Monday, google and seven west media inked a 30 million $ deal in which google pays seven west media for the content that it uses. Now, the contours of this deal aren’t readily available but to me, this is the most significant change in the policy and engagement with these two giants.

I have always advocated brands against spending indiscriminate funds on seo/sem and on increasing reach “in organically” on social media.

Consider this:

As a brand, you pay to be listed, pay further to brat your competitors to be listed better and continue to pay more and more as new algorithms find a way to breach your ranking on google.

On facebook, the brands pay to start getting likes on the page. Pay more to get likes on the post. Pay further to get responses or leads and if at all they decide that they have a threshold reach and stop paying, they would have to settle for a single digit reach of the post within the followers already on the page!!!

But for a while now, this became a vicious cycle.

Brand managers worry how they would face their CEOs if the number of likes and engagement is inferior to competition

The CEOs are worried how they would face their board members and investors

So everyone hopped onto the bandwagon and created this beautiful mirage called “Digital Marketing”! Every single quarter, the spends on digital marketing increased in healthy double digits where are the rest of traditional media struggled.

All this is still okay but the problem is that content, also got cannibalised.

A news channel or a print publisher, employs people on-ground across the length and breadth of the country, they report news, shoot images and videos which get edited, curated and published.

These just get “listed” against a key word or a hashtag on these platforms and no publisher resists.

Why? These publications, through their video platform give citations! They acknowledge publishers to have attained Diamond, Gold or some other fancy creator awards but wont pay for the content!

Why don’t publishers protest or deny these platforms from accessing the fruits of their labour free of cost?

I believe that it is largely because, the publishers don’t essentially want to ruffle these biggies.

In that context, it is admirable how the publishers aligned with their government and got these biggies to acknowledge the issue and modify the stance.

The agreement with seven media is miniscule.

There needs to be a greater payout. The content creators and publishers need to get a better share of the pie. 

We all know that both the news channels and the print media face the twin challenge of miniscule increase in subscription revenue on one side and increase in publishing/content creation costs on the other.

Many brands which advertise also are seeking more cost effective and measurable advertising avenues making the growth in revenue increasingly difficult.

In that situation, how fair is it that these platforms access and use the content without paying these publishers?

I think it’s about time that all the publishing houses unite, represent the case to govt., and replicate what happened in Australia.

(Armed with Engineering, Business Management academic background and an alumnus of IIM-B, Satyanarayana Murthy YVS has worked across varied roles starting from Manufacturing, Sales, Channel Management, Distribution, Brand, Marketing and PR, Business Strategy and Business Management across diverse sectors)