WILL A GOVERNMENT LEASE OF LIFE SAVE LEGACY MEDIA?

Advertising spends are a good indicator of a country's attention economy.

- Archna Shukla

The spread of ad budgets across media platforms and content genres reflects is how a country’s consumers entertain, inform and educate themselves. Active or passive, these habits lead to decisions that shape the political and social environment of the country.

It may, thus, be argued that ad spends play an important role in a functioning democracy. It is for this reason that the government's decision to raise advertising rates for print by 26% is inadequate, both in prognosis and the remedy offered. It said this was essential revenue support to help sustain print operations and quality journalism amid cost escalations and unrelenting competition from digital platforms.

Indeed, the conventional media industry is battling for survival as Al, LLMs and deep machine learning reshape content creation and upend the distribution model that were already disrupted by the likes of Google and Meta. Today, automated systems are writing news, editing videos and generating hyper-realistic imagery at a fraction of what it costs to run a traditional newsroom. This forces legacy media to compete with infinite, low-cost content that floods social feeds and search engines as news and views, stealing attention and more importantly, ad revenue.