It has never been sublime but now, by God, it is ridiculous: Media regulation in New Zealand has reached the point where the public it is supposed to serve are left confused and incredulous.
The fault lies with successive governments that have seen the issues, then walked away because they think the solutions are too hard or they do not have the guts to confront powerful foreign forces. Governments led by both National and Labour have wilfully ignored the fact that the entire system is anachronistic and needs urgent replacement.
Last week the outdated nature of the system was brought into sharp relief by the Broadcasting Standards Authority’s attempt to ram a round peg into a mouldy square hole. In order to claim jurisdiction over Sean Plunket’s online entity The Platform, the BSA was forced to squeeze every last morsel of possible meaning out of its empowering legislation. Continue reading “When something is this broken, it’s time get a new one”→
If it was possible for something to be epically depressing, it would be the advertising statistics released last week. For the first time, the annual digital-only advertising spend in New Zealand was double that of all other media combined.
The vast majority of that digital-only spend is with Facebook, Google, and TikTok. It disappears offshore with only a risible amount of taxation deducted from companies that are artful profit shifters. Worse, it has sucked the lifeblood out of our media industries along the way.
Figures released by the Advertising Standards Authority showed that the digital-only spend was $2.7 billion. All other media in New Zealand– through both their traditional outlets and their own digital platforms – attracted $1.35 billion in advertising revenue. The numbers could not have been starker.
The New Zealand Herald’s Media Insider, Shayne Currie, attempted to cast doubt on the digital spend after the ASA figures were released, noting that – unlike local media – the transnational platforms do not release actual figures. The digital-only spend is based on estimates. However, if anything, the digital-only estimates may be on the low side because the Interactive Advertising Bureau tracks only Facebook, Google and TikTok. It does not report on LinkedIn, Spotify, X and the like.
First there was Dracula, followed by Nosferatu. Buffy the Vampire Slayer despatched a few, but then we were shown What We Do in the Shadows. However, for the cold-hearted realities of vampirism, nothing beats that on-going series The Advertising Standards Authority’s Advertising Turnover Report.
In a chillingly sangfroid fashion, its latest episode indicates that yet again the transnational platforms have sunk their fangs ever deeper into the media’s jugular.
I have been charting the ad revenue fortunes of the New Zealand media almost since the birth of the Advertising Standards Authority in 1990 and have been paying particular attention to statistics since 2007. That was the year that newspaper and television ad revenue peaked and also the year we started to see digital platforms posting exponential increases in their annual take.
In 2007 those platforms – the likes of Google and Facebook – attracted a relatively modest $135 million. Last year their share of the advertising spent was $2.171 billion. By comparison, the newspaper share has dropped from $826 million to $274 million while television had dropped from $654 million to $490 million. In total, the digital-only spend last year was almost twice that spent on all other advertising. Let’s put that is some perspective: The last time New Zealand media recorded a total as low as what they earned last year ($1.1 billion) was thirty years ago.
Only radio has been holding its own in advertising revenue, but it has been basically flat lining for the past decade. It has bumped along at between $260 million and $280 million a year, apart from the COVID dip experienced by all local media (but not the digital-only platforms). It was up $5 million in 2024, but $4 million below the $276 million it recorded in 2022. Allowing for inflation, even radio is not in the best of health.
Admittedly, the digital-only gain for 2024 was slightly down on the previous year – up a mere $59 million against the previous year’s $87 million. That could mean there are signs that the rate of growth may be slowing. Alternatively, it could be only a sign of the economic times and recovery will signal a return to exponential growth.
You know you are old when the subjects in a history book are people you have met.
I had that experience ambling through Ian F. Grant’s Pressing On, the second volume of his history of New Zealand newspapers.
It is shorter than his first volume Lasting Impressions – 670 pages against 676 pages – and covers the period 1921 to 2000. However, it wasn’t the modern era that threw up names I knew well. I found myself recognising characters that first entered the industry before or shortly after the Second World War.
There is one particular photograph to which I was drawn. It pictures the editorial staff of the Hawera Star in 1948. In the front row is a fresh-faced Pat Booth who would later earn an indelible place in New Zealand journalism as a crusading editor and investigative journalist. At the end of the row stands Harry Dansey, still bearing the memories of the fierce fighting he witnessed as a member of the 28th Māori Battalion. Continue reading “History moulded by molten lead”→
