Business of Media
Google and Facebook make 60¢ from every ad dollar spent online
Google and Facebook sold a combined $8.3 billion worth of digital advertising in Australia last year, yet the vast majority – $7.26 billion – was attributed to their parent companies as “reseller revenue”, reports Nine Publishing’s Sam Buckingham-Jones.
Documents filed with Australia’s corporate regulator reveal the scale of revenue the tech giants are making locally, and the relatively low levels of income they attribute to the local market for tax purposes.
Despite reporting $8.4 billion in revenue across advertising, cloud storage, servicing and hardware – products such as its Pixel phone – Google declared $1.95 billion in revenue in Australia after accounting for its role as a reseller. It paid $92.6 million in income tax for last year, and wrote $273.7 million in profit.
In the footnotes of its accounts, Google noted that it made $8.4 billion across its products, up from $7.2 billion last year, and $7.1 billion of that was from advertising – up from $6.1 billion in 2021. Google is a largely advertising-funded business. It sells ads on its dominant Google Search product, it owns YouTube, and it runs powerful exchanges used to buy and trade digital advertising.
A spokesman said Google had invested more than $1 billion in its local operations and was the only multinational tech company to sign up to Australia’s voluntary Tax Transparency Code.
Facebook, meanwhile, made $1.26 billion from advertising – up from $1.14 billion – but declared $224.6 million in revenue locally after accounting for its own reseller expenses. It pays Facebook Ireland, which runs the Facebook platform outside the US and Canada, to re-sell ad spots. Facebook Australia lodged a $34.7 million profit after $42.8 million in tax.
Banning WeChat would ‘damage’ democracy, experts say
Banning WeChat in Australia risks causing “emotional, psychological and practical harm” to the country’s large Chinese-speaking community, experts have told a Senate inquiry, reports Nine Publishing’s Gus McCubbing.
Australia has become the last of the Five Eyes nations to ban viral video-app TikTok from government devices, and a tighter clampdown on social media, particularly those with Chinese ownership, is expected in the coming months. WeChat, owned by Chinese technology titan Tencent, is believed to have about 1 million users in Australia, with 1.3 billion users worldwide.
Seth Kaplan, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, last month told the inquiry into foreign interference through social media he would support banning WeChat, which he described as a “narrative machine for the CCP” that is “worse than TikTok”.
At least 14 Australian government departments either block, ban or have not approved WeChat across their networks and devices. But Dr Wanning Sun, from the University of Technology Sydney, and Dr Haiqing Yu, from RMIT, on Thursday made a late submission to the inquiry in which they argued banning the Chinese social media app would cause more harm than good.
WeChat, they say, is essential for communication between Chinese Australians and their families, friends, and business partners in China given other social media apps including WhatsApp and Facebook are banned. The platform was even used, in some cases, to farewell dying relatives while China’s borders were closed during the pandemic.
Nine chief Mike Sneesby announces further cost-cutting
Nine Entertainment will make “structural” cost cuts across the company this year, as the heightened economic uncertainty continues to bite into the media giant’s bottom line, reports The Australian’s James Madden.
Speaking at the Macquarie Australia Conference a day after Nine’s trading update, chief executive Mike Sneesby said the further cuts would be on top of the $20m in savings that had already been found in the business this financial year.
“That started in the first half. And it started with us pre-empting what we thought would be a slowdown in the consumer sector,” Sneesby said.
“It really becomes people and content where we have an opportunity to tighten up costs and we have tightened those this year.
“In terms of one-off all underlying costs – and we will make some cost reductions structurally as we head into FY24 given the uncertainty – again, those tend to be across a range of areas but primarily the flexibility comes in people and content.”
Trading update slashes $300m from oOh!media
Analysts at Jefferies and Morningstar have slashed revenue forecasts for Australia’s largest outdoor advertising company, oOh!media, concluding it is losing market share despite being in the fastest-growing media category, reports Nine Publishing’s Sam Buckingham-Jones.
While television, audio and news media dragged the ad market down in March to a 1.5 per cent decline year-on-year, out-of-home advertising – the catch-all term for billboards, digital screens and panels – surged more than 30 per cent, per Standard Media Index figures.
But oOh!media shares fell off a cliff on Wednesday, declining 24 per cent to $1.24 after CEO Cathy O’Connor gave a trading update to the Macquarie Australia conference in Sydney. They fell a further 7 per cent to $1.14 on Thursday.
A brutal 48 hours for the outdoor advertising company took its market valuation from almost $970 million to just above $700 million.
Radio
Sydney radio wars: History of all the sackings, shocks and slumps
Shock jocks, singalongs or serious news – whatever your radio tastes, Sydney’s airwaves have it all, reports News Corp.
Over the past 40 years a war has raged behind the scenes as stations battle for our attention and engagement.
These are the stories – as told at the time – of four decades of scandals, sackings, slumps and shocks, all in the quest for ratings supremacy.
Television
My last conversation with MasterChef judge Jock Zonfrillo
It could have been an email Q+A, but I’m thankful instead Jock Zonfrillo and I shared another one of our famed, long and rambling chats just last week, writes News Corp’s Lisa Woolford.
There was no presentiment that this could be our last catch-up.
He’d been in Italy with his family after MasterChef season 15 wrapped, I was on holidays but we both shifted our schedules around so it would work.
As News’ resident MasterChef guru I caught up with Jock and his fellow judges Melissa Leong and Andy Allen regularly after announcing their appointment in 2019. And it swiftly became like touching base with friends, rather than an annual appointment with TV celebrities to promote their hit show.
Chatting with Jock was always easy – and lengthy (the bane of Ten publicist’s schedules).
Last Monday was no different – he was excited for the new season, telling me about the new batch of great characters, and how happy he was that former contestant Brent Draper, who exited the kitchen abruptly in 2021, had returned.
ABC’s Insiders moving to Canberra
It’s long been one of those quirks of the ABC that its premier Sunday morning political show aired from Melbourne, reports Nine Publishing’s Myriam Robin.
Sure, it’s a great city and all. But it’s not the capital, where the events being described by the show’s guests actually tend to occur.
As of July 9, however, the ABC’s Insiders, hosted by the Canberra-based David Speers, will be staying firmly inside the beltway. The show will air from Canberra, where a spokeswoman said it would be “much closer to the action of Parliament House, as well as the press gallery, the public service, the diplomatic corps and Defence”. No kidding.
Its regular guests couldn’t be more thrilled. Most of them, after all, live and work in the bush capital, and so gave up most of their weekend to trek to Victoria on Saturday afternoon to appear on the show.
Screen Forever 2023: Hugh Marks: “Commercial networks have a distinctive lack of First Nations content”
Former Nine CEO Hugh Marks says Free to Air networks have a distinctive lack of First Nations content while much of Australian drama is moving behind paywalls, reports TV Tonight.
Marks, now Co-CEO of Dreamchaser Entertainment, was speaking at a Q+A session around Australian culture on screen, at Screen Forever this week.
A panel, moderated by Fran Kelly, tackled questions around whether Australia is sliding inexorably into making more content for global citizens, at the expense of our own culture.
Angela Bates, Screen Australia’s First Nations Department said, “I think ABC do a fantastic job at commissiong great quality Australian drama and Mystery Road is proof of that. It is proof of how our First Nations Stories have really traveled the world. The second series had its world premiere, at the Berlinale and that same year, it was listed in the New York Times as a Top 20 International TV show.”
Hugh Marks of Dreamchaser Entertainment and formerly Nine Network CEO said, “Whilst commercial networks may not be doing as much Australian drama as they used to, they have migrated onto the streaming platforms. But the problem is you’ve got to pay for it. That’s what’s fundamentally changed over the last 3 years, let along the last 10 years.
“In terms of First Nations and Indigenous drama I think the commercial networks have a distinctive lack of content in that space. A few of the things that have been mentioned today are going to change that.”
ABC host Stan Grant joins King’s coronation coverage despite ‘visceral anger’ after Queen Elizabeth II’s death
Q+A host Stan Grant will appear in the ABC’s coverage of King Charles III’s coronation despite revealing he felt “betrayed” by his employer and colleagues following Queen Elizabeth II’s death, reports The Australian’s Sophie Elsworth.
Days after the release of his book The Queen is Dead, Grant is among the ABC’s line-up, which will be hosted by Julia Baird and Jeremy Fernandez on Saturday night.
Grant, a Wiradjuri, Gurrawin and Dharawal man, only recently spoke out of his disgust at the way the ABC handled the Queen’s death in September last year, telling Radio National breakfast host Patricia Karvelas he felt “visceral anger” in the days following.
He then began writing his latest book on his Indigenous past and faith and he lashed out at his employer and colleagues for paying little attention to how he was feeling at the time.
Sports Media
‘Rubbish’: Tripp addresses rumours News Corp-backed Betr about to collapse
Leading bookmaker Matt Tripp insists his wagering start-up Betr isn’t on the verge of collapse despite growing speculation major shareholder News Corporation has lost faith in the venture, reports Nine Publishing’s Andrew Webster.
Betr was launched in October last year, realising a long-held ambition of News Corp co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch for the media giant to wade into the lucrative world of online sports betting in Australia. Murdoch launched Fox Bet in the US in May 2019.
To entice new customers, Betr tossed up a controversial promotion that offered odds of 100 to 1 – with a maximum bet of $10 – on several sports, including the Melbourne Cup.
If favourite Deauville Legend saluted in last year’s race, Betr was looking at a $50 million loss. When the horse finished fourth, Tripp and his team partied in the Betr offices until the early hours, such was the relief.
But the feeling within betting circles – and some quarters of News itself – is the Betr party is over.