Australia’s role as a testing ground for global media giants such as the New York Times, the Daily Mail and the Guardian could hasten the decline of embattled local players as they fight for eyeballs and advertising dollars, analysts said.
With traditional sources of circulation and advertising revenues drying up, the world’s biggest news brands are spreading their wings to grow digital audiences.
One of the first places they have set up, producing local content for the domestic market, is Australia — already home to some of their largest foreign audiences and with a ready population of early technology adopters and keen news consumers.
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However, with the market nearly saturated, analysts said the foreign outlets, with their deep pockets and mostly free content, are eating into struggling local media’s revenues.
This has helped accelerate job cuts and belt-tightening at some of the country’s main publishers — Fairfax, which publishes the Sydney Morning Herald, and The Age and News Corp Australia, which publishes The Australian and the Sydney Daily Telegraph.
The foreign publishers “don’t require a subscription, don’t have a paywall and the problem is that’s weakening and disrupting all the existing players,” Fusion Strategy media analyst Steve Allen told reporters, dubbing them “foreign invaders.”
“So it’s a nasty convergence of new entrants taking eyeballs away from the traditional mastheads and eroding their revenue base,” he said.
Advertising revenues are already under siege from Google and Facebook, with Morgan Stanley estimating last year they would suck up 35 to 40 percent of the total pool of A$13.9 billion (US$10.36 billion) in Australia.
A battle is also taking place to win readers.
Fairfax, News and the Australian Broadcasting Corp are the most-read news Web sites in Australia, but Britain’s Daily Mail, Guardian and the BBC — which all have bureaus in Sydney — are making inroads.
The British titans were the fifth, sixth and seventh-most read, according to March data from audience measuring service Nielsen.
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