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The Great Rebalancing in Australian Media

Australian media isn't dying because social media stole its audience. It's dying because a whole new class of intermediaries is better at capturing value than publishers ever were.

Travis Holland

— 4 min read
The Great Rebalancing in Australian Media

If we take a narrow view of what the term 'media' means, the 2020s so far have seen an all but complete unravelling of what remains of Australia's media industry - and, honestly, the pace only seems to be accelerating. But the frequent claim that the problem is just about where and how audience attention has shifted needs rethinking: what 2026 seems to be showing is that there is a much bigger cultural rebalancing underway.

As the internet really hit its commercial stride in the 2010s, advertising dollars followed attention to social media platforms. Major media organisations tried playing nicely with those platforms; the video pivot of 2015 is a major case in point. This was also the decade when internet speeds became capable enough that video streaming services like Netflix and YouTube could really compete with terrestrial broadcasters, and similarly for Spotify and it's ilk in the audio space. As the late, great Graeme Turner noted in 2018:

the arrival of Netflix represents a key point in Australian television’s transition from a national, largely broadcasting, market to a transnational multiplatform market... the rapid take-up of Netflix is changing the patterns of consumption within households and the shape of the local media economy on all levels

By 2020-21, the traditional media players - particularly NewsCorp - were so under pressure that they managed to convince the government the digital media giants like Facebook and Google were "stealing" their content; pressure which lead to the introduction of the News Media Bargaining Code. And yet, because the issue was less about content and more about where consumers were spending their time, traditional media has continued to decline precipitously while digital platforms grow, and grow, and grow.

And none of this is even to mention the emergence of AI as a news platform and the notion of Google Zero - a mooted point at which traffic from search essentially stops. In response to AI, some traditional media have continued the appeasement approach which failed so miserably with social media, selling their content to the scrapers for a few million (and why not, they'd simply take it regardless, you may as well get paid).

But the first months of 2026 seem to have the ground shifting even quicker around Australian media:

I actually think the Kyle and Jackie O issue is emblematic of the larger pattern. Their $200million deal was a bet on national expansion just as the economics of national commercial radio were collapsing. It represents a bet on the old way of doing things which just doesn't work any more. And now the dispute has turned into a sunk-cost trap for ARN just as other factors are working against them. This is an organisation whose main stars are on contracts worth more than the entire company.

But is the crisis in Australian media all about attention and advertising? Not necessarily. Where once media was funded indirectly through the attention of audiences, now audiences are just as likely to be funding projects, publications, channels, and creators directly. And this is where a broader view of media lands us: media is a generator and representative of culture as a whole, it isn't just the collection of corporatised media businesses who produce and deliver 'content'. The problem - at least from the business side - then becomes about the intermediaries who are better at value capture than the publishers ever were.

Let's look at some of those intermediaries. For example, creator app Patreon now claims to have paid over $10 billion to creators, netting themselves a monthly percentage (between 5-12%) plus processing fees, and an additional 30% to Apple if the purchases are made via iPhone.

Small businesses everywhere can sell direct to new audiences, turning themselves into publishers along the way. Attention is no longer the main currency. Currency is currency:

  • the Value for Value model being used in some newer podcasting apps
  • Dropshipping apps such as Fourthwall (disclaimer: I use them)
  • the well-established craft website Etsy
  • the TikTok shop
  • and of course, the explosion of paid newsletter platforms such as Ghost (this site) and Substack

People are creating media and contributing to culture in their own way, at smaller scales, in niches, and broader terms than we might ever have considered to be part of the media industry. This is bringing about a profound rebalancing of where culture is made and how it is funded. And we can only understand that rebalancing by thinking about media in much bigger terms.

Whereas publishers were concerned about Google stealing the traffic which validated their audiences for advertisers, nowadays the audience just purchases directly, bypassing both the advertisers, older media, and the intermediaries like Google that they were so concerned about. And the fight had already moved on by the time the News Media Bargaining Code was even implemented.

Instead of the media acting as intermediaries selling attention to advertisers, people are now just paying for their own attention directly. It isn't just about an attention shift, but a whole rebalancing of the ways people participate in media, culture, and even commerce. And while it might be just one class of intermediaries has replacing another, that remains a problem for the media business as we knew it.

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