Scoop has an Ethical Paywall
Google's Support For Democracy And Media In NZ | Part 2
Part 2: Google & Scoop - A Brief History
To read Part 1: The Digital Media Bargaining Bill, NZME, STUFF & Google, go here.
Google Support For Scoop 1999-2004 & for The News Ecosystem Globally
Google is the dominant global pathway to news discovery. Nothing else comes close.
It also owns Youtube which is the most sophisticated and dominant free live news streaming platform. Youtube is also the most used streaming service by news publishers.
And youtube is not the only critical piece of news service delivery infrastructure provided by Google for free to the News Industry.
Google - more than any other platform company - provides critical technical infrastructure that all news companies use to run their businesses.
Google & Scoop
Scoop launched in 1999 the same year that Google publicly launched.
The team at Scoop were however aware of Google earlier as during the pre-Scoop period 1996-1999 - near the dawn of the Internet Age (www was initiated 1992-93) - we could see the early GoogleBot crawling our predecessor publication to Scoop, Newsroom.co.nz. Consideration was even given to blocking the Googlebot as we did not know what it was. It was good that we did not do so.
During the 2000s the Google Search Engine very quickly became dominant and was soon after the biggest source of inbound news traffic globally, very rapidly replacing Alta-Vista, its only competitor, which was not in the same league.
When Yahoo took Google on as its search engine Google exploded overnight. And in the years that followed it proceeded to double down on its news focus and started building critical infrastructure for the industry.
This was the beginning of Google's digital publisher ecosystem play.
In 2008 Scoop implemented Google Analytics and Double-Click For Publishers DFP - two free enterprise grade Google products which were and are invaluable for news publishers all over the planet, and services we continue to use today.
DFP is a particularly important product for publishers as it is an enterprise grade advertising delivery system, a service which makes it possible for smaller publishers to compete for advertising dollars for free and to sell advertising directly - it is designed to provide a working interface with Advertising Agencies to manage work flow. Scoop used it to power the Scoop Media Cartel - a pooled advertising sales group managed by Scoop for a bunch of independent publishers who at that stage were not in a position to manage sales.
Google also opened up publisher interfaces to its search functionality - "Search Console" and its "Google Sitemap" services which enable news publishers to ensure that Google indexes their material.
Google also built Google News which indexes news websites in near real time - making new stories immediately available via search. Scoop's usefulness comes in large part from its timeliness and this is due to Google News.
Google is therefore the last company that the Government should be threatening with special targeted taxes to support the media.
Google already supports media. META would make a better target but they have taken a hard line and have walked away from news altogether rather than considering paying publishers. In Canada at one point they literally shut down Facebook to make their position clear on this.
More recently with the Google News Initiative, Google has gotten even further into the business of assisting news publishers, they provide training courses and materials and have moved into the area of professional development and publisher support (Including the now considerable support in NZ) and running awards competitions, one of which Scoop won in 2022. As part of its benefits of winning that Google Innovation Award - for our business model - the Scoop Pro -Ethical Paywall - Scoop attended an Asia Pacific masterclass in commercial news management practice paid for by Google and delivered by the Financial Times Consultancy team. An NZME group also participated in the course with us along with a team from TheSpinoff.
Scoop's own solution to the News Crisis
With our "Ethical Paywall" Scoop Pro Revenue - Scoop has over the past nine years been able to survive several periods of financial head winds with much less bother, eventually reaching a new equilibrium. Since 2019 this has meant we have not had to pursue either advertising or sponsorship or run public fund raising campaigns.
However we may now have to resume doing so in coming months to supplement cashflow until there is clarity over the issue with Google. We are hopeful that our readers, contributors and donors will be willing and able to help get us through this latest challenge if it comes to this.
Scoop's recent outage
Following our technical difficulties in September Scoop's infrastructure has been renovated and traffic and revenue growth have resumed thankfully.
That said, the shock of losing Google Support will leave a significant hole in our finances and will require us to seek additional revenues to maintain our services in coming months. We are open to running campaigns and advertising should any of our supporters or even better should any corporates wish to sponsor us for a while.
That said we will not have a problem should the Government position on the Digital Media Bargaining Bill change and should Google decide to restart its Showcase Program in NZ.
However right now as our payments from Google have now come to an end we face some immediate challenges and would request that our readers and supporters maintain their current support for us - and that commercial users who are not yet licensed to Scoop Pro visit pro.scoop.co.nz and find out what productivity benefits they can get by subscribing to Scoop Pro.
Conclusion
With respect to Google's current position on the Digital Bargaining Bill Scoop is not at all annoyed with Google about this.
For us the villains here are the two largest digital publishers, NZME and STUFF who have pushed for this bill, and who appear to be unconcerned about the consequences of their actions for smaller publishers such as us.
They appear to be under the mistaken impression that Google may be coerced into effectively paying them a link tax for providing traffic to their websites - which is as explained above - a major source of traffic and a revenue driver for their businesses.
Google will not do so. And as explained above, it will not change its mind on this regardless of what STUFF and NZME do. Their standover strategy will not work.
Their position also seems rather graceless given that they already receive significant support from Google. They need to drop their unrealistic expectations about the amount of money they can obtain from this single source - and should instead refocus their efforts on finding more sustainable methods to finance their operations. Or should they think they can do so - lobby the government for a solution that will actually work. Though as they seem to have no real ideas this looks unlikely.
NZME and Stuff appear to be willfully unaware of the benefits they receive from Google driven traffic to their websites. Absent this traffic their site traffic will fall dramatically, reducing readership, and revenue.
This is literally a case of these publishers biting the hand that feeds them.
It would also be helpful if the Government could be a little more realistic about its repeated policy failures in addressing the issue of funding public interest journalism.
The underlying cause of all this is NZ's small scale which makes digital advertising non-viable as a media funding model in NZ. This could be fixed if the Government were to dramatically increase its advertising spend or to instruct Government agencies to pay for news services that they use in the course of their business.
But absent that I cannot see a way that they can help us which will not look like an attempt to manipulate the media to be more positive about them.
The most obvious and legitimate way (as noted above) for the Government to support media would be to adopt a policy of paying for the media that they consume - as they did during the Covid period - on an ongoing reliable basis. This would not solve the issues in the media but it would provide useful relief.
So what is the solution to the question of funding NZ News Media?
These issues are far from new. I remember attending a meeting at MBIE's "All of Govt Procurement" unit with Stuff's Sinead Boucher and several other media bosses back around 2013-14. Several media representatives including both of us gave presentations about the issues the industry is facing. The response at the time from MBIE was to set up an "advertising panel" in its unit. Scoop never received a single advertising booking from this panel and as I recall from subsequent discussions with other companies on the panel, neither did anyone else.
By 2013 Digital advertising revenues had already been falling for a decade - the golden period was brief from 2004 to 2007. Advertising was a useful revenue source for Scoop from 2004 till 2014, but after the Election at the end of 2014 the market effectively died for smaller publishers. For a period of several years from 2008-2013 Scoop's "Scoop Media Cartel" sold advertising collectively for several independent online news publishers including Russell Brown's "Hard News", Ana Samways "Spare Room", David Farrar's Kiwiblog and The Standard collective. We pooled the digital advert sharing using Google DFP and shared the revenue proceeds across the group. However revenues had become very small by around 2012.
After the election in 2014 Scoop made a decision to give up on digital advertising altogether as the cost of sales was high and the bookings minimal. Over the following summer we pivoted all our revenue efforts to our professional subscriber product NewsAgent. We introduced our Scoop Pro Ethical Paywall model in June the following year in 2015, and by 2019 this was producing sufficient revenue to keep the lights on without running crowd funding campaigns.
This source of revenue now provides us with all of our income. It comes from our professional users which is fair as they are using us in the course of their work.
The "Ethical" in "Ethical Paywall" is a reference to the fact that we keep the Scoop site open to the public to use - and in doing so serve the public interest in providing timely access to all the content that we publish - around 120-150 items a day.
And for the past 9 years this has kept the lights on.
If even 10-15% of our professional corporate users were to pay us we would be able to substantially improve and expand the news service that we provide. However at present we have large numbers of large private, local Government and Central Government corporate users who ignore the clear signage on our website which requests that they obtain a commercial use licence.
Failed Government Efforts To Support Media Directly
Successive NZ Governments have over recent years bungled media policy, angering both the public and the industry. The issues came to a head with the 55 Million Public Interest Journalism Fund which was announced by the Labour Govt. as a stopgap measure to address the issues the industry was facing after Covid.
But the Fund was run by NZ On Air in an unfortunate manner, raising significant concerns from both media companies and among the public. The Major Publishers NZME, Stuff, Radio NZ, TVNZ and Newshub received the lion's share of the funds which was to be expected. A second tier of selected publishers received the bulk of the remaining funds. Scoop applied for all of the rounds of funding and did not receive any funds at all. When we asked why we had been excluded we received a perfunctory one liner "Your Mahi is not what you think it is."
From Scoop's perspective - a not-for-profit charity owned business owned by the Scoop Foundation For Public Interest Journalism - the irony of NZOA giving the same name to their project whilst effectively blacklisting us was interesting.
But perhaps worse and more frustratingly the policy framework for the Public Interest Journalism Fund was not followed by either NZOA nor the Ministry of Culture and Heritage which was the funder.
According to the Cabinet Minute creating the fund it was supposed to be a stop gap fund to preserve public interest journalism whilst the Government came up with a new approach to funding news media. Scoop fortunately survived without any assistance from the fund.
But by the time the fund came to an end it had acquired an unfortunate reputation both within the industry for how it selected and managed projects, and also in political circles where many felt that it had become a slush fund for influencing media coverage. This judgment was probably harsh and not particularly well backed up by the facts, but it was without a doubt part of the reason that the fund was not extended.
As for the policy ideas which were supposed to be developed during the period of the fund to provide some greater certainty to the industry going forward? When I inquired about these in 2023 I discovered that no additional work had been done, either by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage policy team, nor by the State Services Commissioner responsible for Media.
Apparently it was all just too hard.
Alastair Thompson
Scoop Publisher
Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.
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