Monetizing online is a big challenge for publishers and media industry: Pierre Petillaut

At the e4m-DNPA Future of Digital Media Conference, Pierre Petillaut, Managing Director, APIG spoke to Hemant Jain, the President and Business Head (digital) Lokmat, about the European Union’s new Copyright Directive 2019 and the Digital Services Act.

Through a detailed presentation, he explained the many challenges of newspaper circulation in a digital world.

Petillaut highlighted the challenges that newspapers are facing in France and across Europe. “The problem is clearly the business model. We have to manage this long transition between paper and digital while still being able to amortize the huge fixed costs of print newspapers. That's beginning to be a problem with a huge decrease in paper circulation, especially for the last 18 months with the price of the product skyrocketing in France and Europe.

"The price doubled for publishers, which is becoming unbearable. We have very strong constraints on the year 2023. We don't know how publishers will be able to cope with that double price. The other problem, of course, is the difficulty to monetize online. I spoke about digital subscriptions but the other big issue is the loss of advertising revenues," he explained.

Petillaut also went on to tell the audience how the new laws in Europe have impacted digital and news media: “COVID crisis accelerated things. We lost many copies, more during the crisis and people massively switched to online consumption of news. The point again is monetization. How do we fend for ourselves through digital? Probably, we collectively French publishers, bear responsibility for the fact that in the first place 10 or 20 years ago, we put a lot of free content online. We were synthesized by platforms to do so. But the problem is that the public now thinks that news is more or less free and that everybody can be a journalist with a smartphone. Take photos, write an article published on a blog on a social network or whatever."

For that notion to change, he said, readers should be convinced that journalism needs investment. "So, the very core of the journalism profession, a lot of people are not really aware of what it takes. So we have this work to convince the public that you should fund journalism, you should fund publishers. That's really a democracy," he emphasised.

He also explained how Digital Acts Services has affected the press in Europe. “We focus here mainly in this presentation on advertising revenues because that's what neighbouring rights are mainly about, but we could also mention a huge problem with terms of access to application stores, huge fees that you have to pay on the price of the subscription to the app store or to the Android store. Of course, it's not the topic of the day but an issue with freedom of the press, with the ability to write what you want on the platform. In France, we have very important concerns about the ability of journalists and publishers to write what they want on Facebook. So that's becoming a big issue, especially with Digital Services Act that has been adopted in Europe not long ago.

"To focus a little bit on advertising revenues, as you can see in 10 years, news publishers were almost cut in half while, of course, social networks expanded a lot. So, the reaction of the European Union in 2019 was to create these new neighbouring rights for the publishers. So, what was the point of this directive? Article 15 was creating the neighbouring rights and you also have this article 17, creating an obligation for platforms that use user’s content such as Facebook and social networks, for example, to ask for consent to write orders. This is also an important part because they could not escape the negotiation thanks to this article 17.”

Lastly, Petillaut discussed the laws and neighbouring rights and why it was a big victory for the industry. “Neighbouring right is the right that is going to someone who is not a direct author of an intellectual production, not a journalist, not a composer but who had this massive influence on the creation of the contents. So, in Europe and especially in France, it is granted to broadcasters, to music producers and now to press publishers. It was not an easy thing to do. We met a lot of opposition before the directive was adopted. The main opposition was from platforms. There was a huge lobbying effort from platforms to sell at a time, with vessels full of young people coming from all over Europe to save the internet, massive email campaigns to members of the European Parliament and so on. So, we had really war machine against the directive. So, it was really a true victory when it was lifted.”