‘Publishers risk waking up and finding that they work for Google’ warns Carsales sales boss
Australian publishers and content makers have been warned that the growing shift of ad revenues to the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn threatens the future viability of their businesses.
L:R Saines, Sheffield, Rothenberg, McIntyre on stage at the IAB Leadership Summit
Speaking at the IAB leadership summit Anthony Saines, director of media at Carsales.com (ASX: CAR) told the room that he worried about the consolidation of digital advertising power.
“I don’t know how healthy that is, where you risk one day waking up and find you are working for Google or Twitter. I think those platforms will end up dominating the world,” said Saines.
Media has always been in the audience business — attracting an audience and then monetising it. For a very long time, they also controlled the means of (content) distribution. Media is still in the audience business – but others like Google, Amazon, Facebook etc — are doing a much better job both in attracting big audiences (by providing products and services that people really want) and monetising. And of course, distribution is now open to everyone. Rothenberg is right — we’ve jsut swapped one form of media concentration for another. Publishers are always free to block their content from any of these big new audience platforms> But I think we all know who will come off second best if they did….