It’s a Dalliance! A Glance to the First Decade of the Digital Reader Revenue Market and How the Google’s and Facebook’s Payments Are Starting to Shape It

This exploratory article maps the development of the reader revenue market, and its aim is twofold: first, to examine how the digital reader revenue market was structured in 2010–2020; second, to investigate how the market was configured during 2020–2021. The article argues that in the past decade, large news publishers were rewarded for the attention they received from their readers in form of digital subscriptions. Their ability to monetize their audience attention gave them a dominant position in the reader revenue marketplace. In 2020–21, Google’s and Facebook’s payments to news publishers started to further strengthen dominant companies as they were reaping the monetary benefits of them. Platform payments raise a concern because news publishers revenue models may become even more ingrained in the platform ecosystem. Additionally, local news outlets are largely excluded from the large platform payments, potentially weakening their financial position in the reader revenue marketplace. However, platform payments are temporary in their nature, and long-term impacts on the market structure are hard to predict. The analysis here is based on data retrieved from three platform companies and 14 newspaper groups operating in 9 Western markets.