Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for letting us appear today.
On behalf of News Media Canada, our member publishers, and the 3,000 journalists we employ, who inform Canadians across the country every day, we are pleased to participate in the pre-budget consultations in advance of the 2022 budget.
Canada's news publishers are facing an existential threat, with Google and Facebook now taking about 90% of online ad revenue. To put this in context, after peaking at $4.6 billion in 2008, newspaper industry revenues have fallen off a cliff. We now stand as an industry below $1.5 billion. During that same time, Google and Facebook have seen their combined Canadian revenues grow from a little over a billion dollars a year to over $8 billion last year.
There's a direct link between the decline in the newspaper ad revenue and Google and Facebook exerting a firm grip on the online advertising system, a system where these monopolies have their thumb on the scale. According to a group of state attorneys general, led by Texas, the CEOs of Google and Facebook personally oversaw an illegal 2018 deal that advantaged them in ad auctions. These behemoths enjoy all of the benefits of being publishers without any of the obligations. They spread a few crumbs around, but they don't employ a single journalist in Canada.
Since 2013, we have lost 300 trusted news titles in Canada, and COVID has made the secular decline even worse. Ad revenue was down 35% in 2020, and more than 40 newspapers have closed permanently since the start of the pandemic.
As titles disappear, news deserts are created. Across Canadian journalism 1,300 jobs have been cut permanently since the beginning of the pandemic. There's no silver bullet to solve this problem, but I'll turn it over to my colleague, Paul Deegan, who will outline one important step that you, as parliamentarians, can take right now to stop the bleeding and put us on a more stable commercial footing.