The Case for Treating South African Journalism as a Market Failure
Print revenues collapsed because two foreign platforms took the advertising money. Fixing this is a competition policy question, not a technology one.
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The dominant conversation about South African journalism has been organised around the wrong noun. The noun most people reach for is print. The noun the evidence points to is advertising. Newspapers and magazines in this country are closing because the money that used to fund them is now being spent somewhere else, and understanding where it went, and who has it now, is the first step in doing anything useful about the collapse of a domestic industry the country’s democracy depends on. This is not a technology transition. It is a market failure, and our own competition authority has now said so on paper.
CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND
The numbers are unambiguous. Media24, the country’s largest newspaper publisher, saw its revenue fall from $207 million three years ago to $102 million in its most recent financial year, a decline of just over half. Its adjusted operating loss for that year widened by 60% to $16 million, and it has just announced a third round of newsroom restructuring in three years, with up to 126 further jobs at risk. Arena Holdings, the country’s second-largest newspaper group, has sold The Herald and Daily Dispatch to new owners, and journalists at those papers went unpaid for months during the handover. Circulation is falling in step. Daily newspaper circulation dropped by 7.74% between March 2025 and March 2026, weekly newspapers by 16.97%, and individual titles are collapsing faster than the sector averages.
The temptation is to read this as a story about print. It is not. Audiences have not stopped consuming news. The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report, based on nearly 100,000 interviews across 48 markets, finds that global news consumption has moved decisively onto social media, video networks and, increasingly, artificial intelligence chatbots, with more than half of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds now saying one of those three is their main source of news. South African audiences have moved with them. News24, IOL and Daily Maverick are all read by more South Africans than any print title now reaches. The audiences are there. The advertising revenue is not.
INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS
The Competition Commission of South Africa has finished a two-year investigation into precisely this question, and the finding is unambiguous. Its Media and Digital Platforms Market Inquiry, published on 13 November 2025, concluded that global platforms, specifically Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, X and AI companies including OpenAI, dominate the gateways through which South Africans access information, and that this dominance has severely undermined the traditional revenue models of local news.
On Google alone, the inquiry estimated that the company extracted between R300 million and R500 million in value from South African publishers in 2023, while reducing referral traffic through zero-click searches and algorithm designs that favour foreign media over local sources. The Commission concluded plainly that Google does not compensate South African media for the news content it displays or summarises.
This is not commentary. It is a formal finding by the country’s competition authority, published on paper, with negotiated remedies attached, including an R688 million media support package agreed with Google and YouTube to fund national, community and vernacular media. The report was handed to Minister Parks Tau on the day of publication with a commitment to table it in Parliament within ten days. The market failure the article is arguing has been named. The question is now whether the remedies match the scale of the problem and whether the legislative enforcement will follow the finding.
The MDPMI adds the economic argument to that observation. The platforms are not only shaping how South Africans encounter news. They are capturing the revenue that pays for it to be produced, and the mechanism by which the revenue is captured is now shifting again. The last remnant of the traditional bargain in which platforms sent traffic to publishers in exchange for the content they surfaced is being eliminated by generative AI answer engines.
Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity’s direct answers, and ChatGPT’s responses now summarise publisher reporting inline, so the reader never clicks through. The MDPMI itself names AI companies including OpenAI among the dominant platforms it investigated. This is not a future problem. It is the current mechanism.
Other democracies have moved on the same question. Australia in 2021 introduced a bargaining code that requires the platforms to negotiate payments to news publishers whose content circulates on their surfaces. Canada followed with its Online News Act in 2023. The European Union has moved on the same question through the Digital Markets Act. Each instrument works differently and each has attracted criticism, but the underlying insight in all three is the same: the platform layer is capturing revenue that would otherwise fund domestic journalism, and the fix is regulatory rather than editorial. South Africa now has the finding. It has not yet had the legislation.
IMPLICATIONS
The implication for policymakers is that the diagnostic work has been done and the political work has not. The MDPMI’s remedies package is a significant achievement, but R688 million spread across national, community and vernacular media is a start, not a settlement. Google’s estimated annual extraction from South African publishers alone runs to hundreds of millions of rands, and the negotiated package covers a fixed period rather than the ongoing revenue transfer. What comes next needs to be legislative rather than negotiated: a bargaining code of the Australian sort with statutory force, a digital services tax with revenues hypothecated to a public interest journalism fund, tax credits for subscription revenue paid to registered domestic publishers, and mechanisms to address the AI answer engine question the MDPMI has already flagged. None of these is a subsidy for print. Each is an attempt to make sure the advertising revenue South African audiences generate through their consumption of news does not leave the country wholesale.
The implication for corporate boards is more immediate. Every chief marketing officer in this country has quietly shifted budget away from South African publishers over the last decade, and most audit committees have never asked what that shift means for the country’s information environment. The MDPMI has now provided the numerical evidence that the shift is real, structural and consequential. If there is a public interest in domestic journalism, and there is, it will need to be visible in advertising policy at the board level as well as in regulation at the state level. The next marketing budget review is a reasonable place to start the conversation.
CLOSING TAKEAWAY
Print in South Africa is not dying because South Africans have stopped wanting news. It is dying because the money that funded it now goes somewhere else, and that somewhere else is a handful of foreign platforms whose interests do not include the sustainability of South African journalism. That is a market failure, and the Competition Commission of South Africa has now formally said so. The next Media24 restructuring will not fix it. What would fix it is legislative follow-through on the finding, board-level advertising decisions that treat South African publishers as part of the country’s information infrastructure, and a national conversation the sector has so far been having in fragments. The diagnostic is on paper. What has to happen next is up to Parliament, the Commission, and the boards whose spending decisions have quietly changed the shape of the market.
Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at www.aiforbusiness.net
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