Data shows industry was already one of the most concentrated in the world

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The takeover of Fairfax Media by Nine further concentrates the Australian media, which, data shows, was already one of the more concentrated media industries in the world.

In 2016, a landmark study on media ownership and concentration, Who Owns the World Media?, was published. The study was a collaboration between academics in 30 countries, and it collated and analysed data on the ownership and concentration of media in each nation.

For each country, the researchers calculated a number of different measures of market concentration across 13 “media” industries.

They looked at which companies controlled how much of any given market using two key measures of concentration. The first is the C4 index, which is the sum of the market share of the top four companies, and the second is the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (HHI), which sums the square of the market share of all companies in the market.

The research further differentiated “content media” – newspapers, magazines, books, radio, TV and film – and “platform media”, which consists of sectors like telecom and internet service providers.



The results show that, in 2011, Australia’s content media industry was among the most concentrated in the world, and had been getting steadily more concentrated over time.

The authors described this combination of high concentration with an upward trend as “problematic”, highlighting Australia alongside Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, Turkey, France and Russia.

Australia had the 10th most concentrated content media industry by this measure. For news media, it ranked as the 11th most concentrated. It is also worth pointing out that the media of several of the countries that ranked more highly are largely state-owned, such as in China and Egypt.

The research also looked at another way of measuring media diversity by counting the number of “voices” in a media market. So, two radio stations, three newspapers and a television channel would all each count as unique “voices”, and a large number of different voices would indicate a diverse market with a range of choices and views, particularly once adjusted for ownership.

Counting the proportion of these voices that are part of multivoice companies gives a measure of media cross-ownership for each country:

Australia ranks toward the higher end, a result of “a combination of the strong position of the private companies and of the public broadcasters in a tight oligopoly”, according to the authors.

Australia also had the most concentrated newspaper industry out of any country studied, again with the exception of China and Egypt:



This concentration is largely due to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which, at the time, controlled 57% of the newspaper market by circulation.

Since this research was carried out, the market has become even more concentrated – APN News & Media was bought by News Corp in December 2016. Based on the 2011 figures, News Corp would have then controlled more than 60% of the market by circulation.

Unfortunately it is difficult to update these figures as News Corp has withdrawn all its print titles from circulation auditing in favour of a new metric that measures readership across all platforms.

However, it is possible to look at the impact of the Fairfax takeover on the online news market.

Using the January 2018 “unique audience” figures from Nielsen as a measure of market share, we can calculate the C4 and HHI for news and current affairs websites with a significant Australian presence:



This analysis shows the Fairfax takeover will significantly increase the concentration of the online news market, with the C4 value going from 68% to 73.4% – an 8% increase, and an indication of a fairly concentrated market. The HHI would increase from 1,619 to 1,961 post-takeover.

Note: I’ve used Nielsen’s January unique audience figures to calculate the C4 and HHI, changing the ownership of Fairfax properties from Fairfax Media to Nine Entertainment to approximate the post-takeover concentration figure. I’m counting any site that has an Australian-specific homepage or edition, and a substantial editorial staff presence in Australia. You can check the working here, please let me know if you spot any errors.

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