The rest of the Web pays for Google and Facebook to be free

Google and Facebook make a lot of noise about how their main services are free to use. And it’s true, they are. But what they don’t highlight is their role in making almost everything else we consume online more expensive.

Consider all the paywalls and paid services that are rolling out across the Internet. News, films, music and even theatrical streaming are now available for a subscription fee. The latest example is Twitter, which announced last week that it plans a paid product, dubbed “Super Follows”, where users can charge followers for “premium” tweets and other content. The move is a way for the company to decrease its dependence on advertising revenue — a pot of money that’s increasingly being swallowed up by just Google and Facebook.

If online power, and the ad revenue that comes with it, continues to concentrate within those two platforms, expect what you watch, read or listen to elsewhere on the Web to start costing you money.

Perhaps now we can forge a better understanding of the value of content. It costs money to produce, so it should also cost money to consume

Before the Internet, advertising subsidised all the media we consumed, from TV and radio to magazines and newspapers. This ad-supported model made its way to the Web and conditioned us to expect online content to be free. News organisations, for example, didn’t charge readers, in the misguided hope that more eyeballs on their stories would bring in more revenue from the banner ads they displayed.

In the past decade, however, that ad money has gone overwhelmingly to the search and social media giants. Last year, Google and Facebook hoovered up 74% of the US$300-billion spent globally to advertise on the Web, according to the World Advertising Research Council. That’s left everyone else who had been reliant on ads