How much does a bottle of water cost, $1.50 maybe? But to a dehydrated traveller in the desert, it’s priceless.
That’s because prices are relative. Professional negotiators cut their teeth on insights like this.
If you have water, and your customer needs a sip to survive, you have leverage.
And right now, AI needs news content because AI is dying. Newsrooms can solve the crisis, so they have leverage. And the market is $13 trillion and rising.
But newsrooms lack negotiators. Instead, the same tired licensing folk are sent to negotiate with AI, and they sell at supermarket prices because it’s all they know.
Worse, their CEOs push them to do so because they need quick cash to satisfy their board and not be sacked.
This short termism means selling the family silver for the next meal, and that will be fatal for most of those rushing in now.
A year ago this week, Google agreed to pay Canadian publishers $100 million to licence content.
In return, the Government dropped a controversial law called the Online News Act, or C-18, that was based on Australia’s media bargaining code.
Google and Meta had threatened to pull news altogether when the law was announced.
As negotiations intensified, Meta walked away and has banned news links on its platforms ever since.
But Google sent hardened negotiators from Silicon Valley to table a deal to politicians which promised $100 million (~US$72 million) a year if they got an exemption.
They won. Terms were agreed that the $100 million a year was in perpetuity, rose in line with inflation, and was backed by legal authority from the nation’s communications regulator.
Some larger publishers rankled as it was less than the $300 million they’d hoped for, but for smaller publishers overlooked by Google, it was a lifeline.
It was standing room only as politicians crowded the room to claim the glory, but there were many other actors in the background pulling strings.
An important voice was Paul Deegan, a public and government relations professional hired by the country’s largest publishers and broadcasters, to counter Google’s legal eagles.
He’s not from media, making him an interesting pick. He was hired out of big business and years managing public affairs for a big Canadian bank and a big Canadian railroad.
As CEO of News Media Canada (NMC), he’s been the tip of the spear, lobbying for the news industry between the Canadian Government and Google.
Today he breaks his silence about what really happened out of sight.
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