The other pay gap: Digital giants leaving media and agencies behind

Readers of Mumbrella may conclude they went into the wrong industry with the release of average salary data last week that shows employees of digital platform companies earning hundreds of thousands of dollars more than agency and media company people.

Workplace Gender Equality Agency numbers, which highlight the gender pay gap, also show the stark difference between the digital giants and more traditional media companies. Of the nine big platforms that Mumbrella identified, Facebook Australia Pty Ltd was by far the most generous, with an average total salary of $737k. This makes it the third best-paying company in Australia, and well beyond the best payers in media and agencyland (Bloomberg at $270k and Publicis Sapient at $214k, respectively).

Google came in second, with a healthy $467k pay average, and Apple was the laggard at $170k.

Note that super and bonuses are all rolled into these numbers.

The relative stinginess of the media and agency sectors is demonstrated by the graph above, which shows average digital platform salaries alongside the combined average of all media and agencies.

Note the media/agency average of $140k in the graph has been determined by averaging the mean pay of media owners and agencies in the dataset (so it is mathematically a company-level average, not an individual worker average).

Within media owners, Bloomberg is far and away the best payer, with out-of-home giant QMS coming in second with $188k the average total pay packet. Gumtree is third at $186k, clear of Foxtel ($174k), Racing.com ($163k) and a peloton of media in the $140-$150k range. As in previous years, the lowest payers are in regional areas.

(click to expand)

The picture changes when only the lowest-paid workers are considered (WGEA numbers are divided into earning quartiles). While Bloomberg and Gumtree remain very good places to be a peon ($139k and $111k respectively), the egalitarian ABC rockets up the rankings to third place. Staff in the worst-paid 25% at the national broadcaster receive $100k in total remuneration on average.

(Click to expand)

In general, media owner pay and agency pay are roughly equivalent ($137k versus $144k overall averages), although with much less variation in agency pay.

(Click to expand)

The WGEA numbers are collected through mandatory annual reporting by Australian employers with 100 or more staff, who must submit payroll data covering base salary, bonuses and superannuation across their entire workforce. For 2024-2025 (the most recent year available), the gender pay gap was 21.1% in the private sector.

According to gender pay gap platform EvenBetter, the pay gap in the media services sector is slightly better than that, at 14.5%. However, it had grown from the previous period by .5%.