Do you have a breakdown in terms of ad host vs ad platform?
We know ad host revenue generated from e.g. Google Ads.
We know CPC to advertisers.
We know Google's top line ad revenue.
But I haven't seen the margin Google et al. take out of the transaction. (CPC - host revenue) / CPC
> In theory Google and Facebook could use their cut to fund journalism, but is that really what we want? The vast majority of journalism funded (and therefore controlled) by a small handful of megacorps?
I'd prefer that? It isn't that different than the historical funding model (plus loose regulation of what a newsroom meant).
> Far better to make it sustainable for individual independent journalists to make living.
I think that's apples and oranges.
The "we have a news budget that can afford to pay a stringer or correspondent to do first-party reporting and/or investigative journalism" type organization is disappearing.
Citizen journalism is important too, but I don't think it's a replacement for the above.
As I heard quipped, "Nobody goes to every local council meeting and takes written notes, so they can catch the 1-2 agenda items a year that should be big local stories."
And absent that (or similar on an international stage), we lose transparency.
We've seen how citizen coding in open source has blind spots where security/cryptography is concerned, and I'd argue we run similar risks relying solely on citizen journalists.
