Media Unmade – Chapter eight: The Invaders and the Independents

Welcome to the latest edition of the Unmade podcast. Today’s edition features another free extract from the audio edition of my book, Media Unmade, which is published by Hardie Grant and available online and in book stores.

We’re now into the start of Act 2 – The Reckoning.

Today’s chapter opens up with a cameo from one of the most misunderstood government ministers of recent years, Labor communications minister Stephen Conroy. Having put many of the digerati offside with his attempts to introduce a national internet filter, few took seriously Conroy’s warnings about the darker side of Google and Facebook. Perhaps we should have listened.

Today I recount how the introduction of Facebook’s News Feed in September 2006 changed the nature of social media, before the fast-growing machine pulled the first of many bait-and-switch stunts on marketers, and then nuked publisher traffic. In parallel, Google’s AdSense was on the rise, sowing the seeds of an existential threat for publishers as the company steadily took control every stage of the programatic advertising chain, while CPMs plummeted.