daniel chigunwe
Moneyweb
The Competition Commission’s investigation into the influence of Google and Facebook on South Africa’s media landscape is advancing rapidly, with its highly anticipated interim report due for release next month.
The report’s publication is poised to be a defining moment in the ongoing fight between mainstream South African publishers and global digital behemoths over the severe, parasitic and near-fatal disruption these giants have unleashed on the local mainstream media.
South Africa’s media industry stands on precarious ground, facing a crisis attributable primarily to the dominance of Google and Facebook. Without timely intervention, the nation’s Fourth Estate risks becoming an echo chamber of only a few remaining players.
Inquiry
The Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry (MDPMI), the division within the Competition Commission leading this investigation, released findings from a comprehensive research survey to understand how South Africans engage with online news platforms this week.
The findings reveal and underscore the extent to which these digital giants have already taken control of media distribution without producing any journalism themselves.
This dynamic has led to a situation where many publishers invest substantial resources in generating news content, only to see it primarily consumed (and monetised) on international platforms.
The survey analysed how South Africans of various ages, locations, and language backgrounds access news across social media, search engines, and personalised news feeds.
Among its most notable findings, 77 percent of respondents rely on social media as a primary news source, with an astounding 84 percent of these individuals accessing news on Facebook.
Following Facebook’s lead, platforms like TikTok (47 percent), WhatsApp (46 percent), YouTube (45 percent), and X (30 percent) show strong usage for news consumption.
Respondents cited ease of access as the primary reason for this preference.
Beyond social media, nearly 20 percent of respondents turn to search engines like Google and Bing for news. In total, this means over 90 percent of South Africans consume news created by local publishers on the platforms of international tech giants.
Strikingly, only 1.2 percent of respondents indicated they do not access news through social media or search engines. Of these, 50 percent preferred traditional platforms such as TV, radio, and print publications, while only 40 percent of that small group visited news websites directly.
This personifies the main challenge publishers like Moneyweb face.
Moneyweb depends on traffic on its website for revenue, forcing it to attract traffic from Google and Facebook.
Theoretically, this should be a symbiotic relationship, but it isn’t.
The reason is that too few visitors from Google and Facebook click on the links, allowing the platforms to retain the audience and make more money from their own advertising.
The research shows that these audiences stay on the platforms as the news content headlines and snippets provide sufficient information about the article for half of the respondents.
Furthermore, around 45 percent of the respondents indicated that headlines and snippets were a convenient way to view news, were time-efficient (38 percent) and that they could avoid paying for news (20 percent).
Painful salt in the wound
Perhaps the most painful salt in the wounds is the research’s finding that South Africans’ perceptions of the credibility of international platforms depend on the quality of news appearing on them – much of which is produced by local publishers.
The South African media has had the most efficient exposure to corruption, unethical conduct, and abuse of power in the past decade.
However, the dominance of tech giants like Google over news distribution is undermining the media’s capacity to fulfil this essential function.
This erosion of the Fourth Estate by global digital platforms, which profit from local news while giving little back to its creators, poses a severe, long-term threat to the sustainability and independence of journalism in South Africa.
Without urgent and meaningful intervention, the damage inflicted by these platforms will weaken one of the country’s most crucial checks on power, impoverishing public discourse and leaving democracy vulnerable.
Bongani Ndlovu