Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Chair and committee members, thank you for inviting us to your meeting. We understand that the committee wishes to learn more about our decision to restrict access to news content in Australia last month. I'm happy to address this to the best of my ability. As you may know, news has since been restored on Facebook following key amendments in the Australian news bargaining code legislation.
The decision to restrict access to news was made with a heavy heart and came after years of working to find a solution in Australia that recognizes the realities of how our services work. Unfortunately, the proposed legislation did not acknowledge basic facts about the Internet, did not recognize the value that platforms provide to news publishers, stood to benefit only large media conglomerates and not independent media outlets, and sought to penalize Facebook for content it didn’t take or ask for.
We are pleased that we have now reached an agreement in Australia that recognizes the value that Facebook brings to publishers. The agreement provides the flexibility for us to support small and local publishers whose work is critical to public interest journalism. The agreement also allows Facebook to retain the ability to decide if news appears on our platform, so that we won’t automatically be subject to a forced negotiation.
Since we entered into this agreement, we have signed agreements with four publishers in Australia. As is the case elsewhere in the world, we will continue to invest more in the long-term sustainability of journalism, not because it is good for our business, but because it is good for democracy and society.
It is important to make clear that we recognize that these difficult times are having a very negative impact on the Canadian media industry. The last two decades, as consumers have shifted from print to the Internet, have been very tough on the media. My colleagues and I are working hard every day to do our part to help publishers adapt.
We work directly with Canadian news publishers, large and small, to help them maximize the value that free Facebook tools provide for their businesses. This includes free distribution of the news links they share on Facebook, which send people directly to their websites, a value we estimate to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the Canadian news industry alone.
Jeff Elgie, the CEO of Village Media, based in Sault Ste. Marie, estimates that in the month of January 2021 alone, Facebook and Google generated 24 million page views for Village Media for free, which he calculates was worth about $480,000 to his news business that month.
Over the past four years, we have gone further by directly investing over $10 million in partnerships and programs to encourage and support the development of sustainable business models for news organizations here in Canada. Just last week, we announced our plans to continue this work with an additional $8 million in news programs over the next three years.
Marc Dinsdale, our head of news partnerships in Canada, will provide you with some highlights from these investments.