How can publishers respond to the power of platforms?

“We may not like them, but they have been absolutely essential in expanding our reach and building our digital business.”

The following essay is adapted from The Power of Platforms: Shaping Media and Society by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter, which was recently published by Oxford University Press. It’s reproduced here with permission.

Large technology companies such as Facebook and Google — in competition with a few others including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and a handful of companies elsewhere — increasingly define the way the internet works and thereby influence the structure of the entire digital media environment.

But how do they exercise this power, how have news organizations responded, and what does this development mean for the production and circulation of news? These are the questions we focus on in our new book.

Our primary objective is to understand the relationship between publishers and platforms, how these relationships have evolved over time, how they play out between different publishers and different platforms, how they differ across countries, and what this wider development — where news organizations become simultaneously empowered by and more dependent on technology companies — mean for news specifically and our societies more broadly. The analysis is based on interviews with more than 50 people working across a range of publishers and platforms in the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom as well as background conversations and observations at scores of industry events and private meetings. We trace the development of the relationship between publishers and platforms over the last decade and focus in particular on the rapid changes from 2015 onward. Beyond “frenemies”

Despite 20 years of often difficult relations, a clear recognition of the “frenemy” dynamic at play, and the reality of intensifying competition for attention, advertising, and consumers’ cash, many publishers still actively seek to collaborate with platform companies. The vast majority continue to invest in platform products and services even when they’re not offered opportunities to collaborate directly.

Here’s how the director of strategic initiatives at a major U.S. newspaper aspiring to join the inner circle of “platform darlings” described the process of actively seeking collaboration with companies that he explicitly recognizes as major competitors for attention and advertising: “We did a lot of begging. We promised to be completely committed to whatever you ask, as long as you ask.” He explained: “We may not like them, but they have been absolutely essential in expanding our reach and building our digital business.”

Going forward, individual publishers have a series of important choices about how to structure their interactions with platforms.

(1) What balance do they seek between onsite and offsite reach? How can the two complement each other while minimizing the risk of cannibalization?

(2) What is the core business model, including the balance between advertising, reader revenue, and other sources? Which combination of platform partners is most likely to enable that business model?

Finally, given that we know that the platforms are here to stay and that their basic offer of reach in return for content is clear, but everything else is likely to continue to change: (3) How can publishers continuously assess the material and immaterial benefits of their investments in platforms and ensure that they are able to adapt to constant change, without locking in on the (all too often mistaken) assumption that a particular platform opportunity or specific platform product is here to stay?

Every publisher will need to think through what reality-based beneficial relationships with various platforms — based on the solid ground of mutual self-interest, not hopeful dreams or empty promises — can look like. Perhaps it is time to leave behind the somewhat moralizing terminology of friends, enemies, and “frenemies,” lest it gets in the way of clear-eyed analysis. Has anyone ever really been “friends” with a billion-dollar corporation? What comes next?

While there is an increasingly lively policy debate around platforms, it is clear that the regulatory road ahead is long, slow, and uncertain.

Publishers, at least in Europe, have often ultimately secured political support for much of what they asked politicians for, but getting policies passed (let alone implemented) takes years, and the concrete benefits have often fallen far short of what publishers hoped for.

The CEO of a major U.S. newspaper company said: “We plan our strategy with two assumptions. The first is that in the future, we will have no print profits. The second is that the regulatory environment will stay roughly the same.” He added: “Even if we did see, for example, antitrust action against the platforms, it would […]

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