Thank you for the opportunity.
I have been running the Globe since 1998. I'm also co-chair of the Canadian Press and I sit on the board of Newspapers Canada and the World Association of Newspapers. Prior to coming to Canada in 1998, I was running, either as an editor or CEO, newspapers in Europe and Asia and in New Zealand. I tend to look outside of our borders for trends, patterns, and solutions.
I've read the evidence that my colleagues from the industry have presented, so I'll avoid repetition. Really, my purpose here today is just to say why The Globe and Mail is a little different to some of the other people you may have been hearing from. We're subject to the same disruption, but our response is different. The Globe is suffering the same steep decline in net print advertising revenue that others are suffering from. It's been going down at about 10% a year for the last four years. Effectively, our print ad revenue was 40% lower in 2015 than it was in 2011.
What makes the Globe different and puts us into a better position is that we've continued to invest in high-quality journalism, because we believe that if you do, readers will pay for good content, whether we deliver it via print or via a digital platform. No other paper in Canada has been able to derive significant revenue from readers paying to access content digitally. Others have tried, and failed because the content is not sufficiently compelling to command a price or sufficiently exclusive. This year our revenue from readers paying for content rose 7%, and we expect that growth to continue. Soon revenue from our subscribers, print and digital, will exceed our total advertising revenue.
Our investigative journalism wins national and international awards for both print and digital. I could list a number of examples, but I think the one most topical recently was that we did a very long, laborious investigation into what was happening to the real estate market in B.C. The B.C. government responded by introducing a foreign buyer tax, and you've seen the federal government announcing measures to cool the excesses of the market. We've also been running a lot of investigative journalism on the suicides among members of the military, which again took a lot of work. It meant one of our reporters spending 18 months combing through every death notice in Canada to find the fact that there were more than 50, because that information wasn't forthcoming from the government.
My point is that this is important work, and I think we need to make sure it continues. It takes resources and long-term commitment. Many newspapers in Canada now lack those resources or that kind of support. The difference comes down to quality of ownership. The Globe and Mail is fortunate to have an ownership that is passionate about good journalism and cares about making a difference for the better in Canada.
That ownership is Woodbridge, which is the investment arm of the Thomson family. It has three generations of rich experience in owning media here, in the U.K., and in the U.S.A. They believe in editorial independence, going back to the early days of Roy Thomson, and they enable me to hire some of the best talent around. That experience, that consistency, is very important. You can see examples in Canada where frequent ownership changes are not beneficial to the preservation of good, strong journalism.
You won't find Woodbridge asking for government handouts or subsidies, but we do like to play on a level playing field. It's not level if taxpayer dollars directed to the public broadcaster make the competition for digital ad dollars more difficult. The CBC is the Globe's largest competitor in the digital ad space amongst Canadian-based media. My colleagues and I in the industry do not support the notion that handing out more money to the CBC helps local or national newspapers.
I think it's worth looking at what's happened in the U.K. with the BBC. I invite the committee to look at the British government's white paper, which restricts the ability of the BBC to accept digital advertising on its domestic websites. Recently it has been announced that the BCC will provide £8 million to enable up to 150 journalists to cover local councils, starting next year. BBC will also make its videos available to local newspapers.
The Globe has benefited from government money in the form of digital tax credits paid out by the Province of Ontario. That has enabled us to hire staff with digital capability at the Globe in a very positive way—journalists, developers, data scientists—to help us with this rapid transition and change in consumption habits from print to digital. Unfortunately, that scheme has now been closed to newspapers, and I invite the committee to think about ways in which digital tax credits could aid that inevitable transition across Canada.
I'll go back to the level playing field for that one final point: the field is sloping unevenly if foreign-based digital companies are exempted from Canadian tax rules as they apply to advertising sales.
Thank you.