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Google and Facebook\u2019s ad \u2018duoply\u2019 is said to be sucking up 98% of every new ad dollar spent online, leaving small local news publishers to grapple for a slither of the remaining pie. To make matters worse, Amazon is getting hungrier for a portion too, leaving publishers extremely worried about the viability of their ad businesses moving forward.<\/p>\n
According to industry estimates, Google and Facebook are on track to account for 64.6% of digital ad dollars spent in the US this year.\u00a0Some efforts have been made by the local press to fight back against this duoply: for example in July, David Chavern, head of the News Media Alliance (known until recently as the Newspaper Association of America) published a proposal in the Wall Street Journal entitled \u2018How antitrust undermines press freedom\u2019, requesting legal protection from Congress so that independent newspapers could collectively negotiate as a unit with Google and Facebook. TV networks, advertisers and the ad agencies\u00a0are also feeling the pressure and recently caused a firestorm over brand safety when ads their products and services were placed alongside videos promoting hate, racism, and violence across the Facebook and Google networks, but this eventually died down and had no real lasting impact.<\/p>\n
Yet despite all of this, it appears Facebook is successfully beginning to woo local news publishers around the world with its Journalism Project<\/a>. \u00a0In the first six months of the operation, the global sessions have brought together 2,600 publishers and Facebook experts, offering best practice guidance on how the social platform\u2019s array of products can help news publishers, covering every phase of digital. It has also hosted 15 News Days for journalists in Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Delhi, Hyderabad, Manchester, Milan, Edinburgh, Manila, Jakarta, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, offering all-day product training, feedback sessions, partners showcases and 1:1 help desks for local journalists and audience, business, and newsroom leads.<\/p>\n In particular, Facebook is making efforts to explain how its products, News Feed and Instant Articles, work so that publishers understand how to get more value from them. According to Facebook, \u201cInstant Articles now pays out more than $1 million per day to publishers via Facebook Audience Network, and in the last six months, RPMs from Facebook Audience Network in Instant Articles have increased by over 50%. We\u2019re excited by this momentum and will continue to invest in Instant Articles: over 10,000 publishers around the world use Instant Articles, growing over 25% in the last six months alone. More than a third of all clicks to articles on Facebook are now to Instant Articles.\u201d<\/p>\n David Beard, a seasoned journalist who is a consultant to the Journalism Project\u00a0through his involvement with the Knight Foundation<\/a> (a US organisation supporting journalism), explains in an interview with Street Fight Magazine<\/a>\n \n Get exclusive insights into digital \n \n \n Stay Forward <\/h2>\n
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