Mark Zuckerberg looks to win new friends in newspaper industry

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has sought to reset the social network’s relationship with the newspaper industry.

Mark Zuckerberg is out to make new friends in the media space. Picture: Getty

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has sought to reset the social network’s relationship with the newspaper industry after meeting with News Corp to hear about the challenges it faces in a digital world.

Mr Zuckerberg and his chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg last week visited News Corp’s New York-based headquarters for face-to-face talks in the latest sign of a thawing in relations as premium sources of journalism come under pressure.

“We spent a day and an evening talking through the issues,” News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson said of the Facebook meeting. “And I think there was a recognition at the end of it, for the relationship to be a fruitful one, particularly for subscriptions, something needs to happen because the current model at Facebook is not working.”

Facebook is in discussions about new mechanisms to boost digital subscriptions at news brands like The Australian and The Wall Street Journal.

Subscriber-driven newspapers around the world such as The Washington Post and The New York Times are relying more on revenue from subscriptions because Facebook and Google have captured a duopoly in the online advertising market.

Pointing out that Facebook and Google were “pretty barren wastelands” without the free content they aggregate, Mr Thomson said there needs to be a more “equitable” distribution of wealth in the digital ecosystem.

Only this week, GroupM, the media buying arm of ad giant WPP, said Google and Facebook would account for 84 per cent of all digital investment in 2017.

Mr Thomson said: “More generally there needs to be a realignment both for commercial reasons but also for social reasons ... in an era fake, faux news to have provenance, to have authenticated authenticity, to have verified audiences.”

Speaking at the UBS 45th Annual Global Media and Communications Conference, Mr Thomson said Google’s decision to terminate its First Click Free program, which allowed internet users to read news articles without paying, would benefit all publishers.

“Frankly we should get a cheque from every publisher around the world,” Mr Thomson joked in reference to how he fought a solitary battle for several years against the business practices of the tech giants.

“That would be an appropriate response from The New York Times, The Financial Times, because it has fundamentally changed the content ecosystem. I’m still waiting for those cheques.

“The folks at The New York Times have expressed gratitude as has The Washington Post. I guess the other thank you cards are in the mail. What you had was a system that punished by banishing subscription content. It wasn’t properly indexed on Google.”

It comes after The Australian revealed on Monday that the Turnbull government has instructed the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission to launch an inquiry into the digital ad market.

In a subsequent interview with this paper, ACCC chairman Rod Sims put Facebook and Google on notice, revealing he would issue early compulsory information notices to the pair.

Commenting on another recent ad boycott at Google’s video-sharing service YouTube, Mr Thomson described the platform as “a toxic waste dump”.

A fresh wave of advertisers suspended commercials on YouTube last month after The Times of London revealed their ads had shown up next to videos of young children, many of which drew crude comments.

To help advertisers reach premium audiences in brand safe environments with robust measurement metrics, News Corp this week launched News IQ, a new advertising platform with an audience of over 140 million in the United States,

The move marks the first time that News Corp has integrated all of its collective first-party data, premium media properties and data science tools into one unified advertising solution.

News Corp believes the launch comes at an opportune moment with marketers and media buyers frustrated by transparency issues at Facebook and Google including faulty metrics, fake news, extremist content and traffic fraud.