Scott Purcell, Co-Founder, Man of Many
The Albanese Government's draft News Bargaining Incentive (NBI), released on April 28 with submissions closing May 18, sends a structural signal that the advertising industry should be reading carefully. Under the NBI, in-scope platforms face a 2.25% levy on Australian-linked revenue above $250 million, which they can offset by entering commercial deals with eligible Australian news businesses. Deals with publishers under $50 million in revenue earn the platform a 170% offset, against 150% for deals with the majors.
To be clear: the offset accrues to the platform, not to the agency or the advertiser. There is no direct fiscal benefit for media buyers in the legislation. What the NBI does do is signal where the Government believes platform money should flow. If Treasury is willing to use the tax system to redirect platform spend toward the long tail of Australian publishing, the question for media buyers is straightforward: what does your own media plan say about the same publishers?
The original Code didn't fix the problem
The original News Media Bargaining Code, per the Treasury statutory review, generated more than 30 commercial agreements between Google, Meta and Australian news businesses. The dollar value of those deals, by consensus academic and AFR reporting, sat in the AUD $200 to $250 million per year range at peak. The Treasury review declared the Code a success on the basis of the deal count.
In the same five-year window, the Public Interest Journalism Initiative recorded a substantial wave of newsroom closures and contractions, particularly across regional Australia, and the Local & Independent News Association (LINA) emerged precisely to represent the 180 small independent and regional newsrooms filling the gap. LINA's members reach 11.9 million Australians a month with public-interest journalism. The NBI is, in part, the Government conceding that the original Code's distribution architecture concentrated funding on incumbents rather than supporting the publishers actually closing the diversity gap.
What the audience trust position actually is
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 puts overall trust in Australian news at 43% (up three points), placing Australia 17th of 48 countries surveyed. The report notes that public broadcasters lead the trust ranking, with commercial television and national newspapers slightly behind, and that Australian news is "not as polarised" as the UK or US.
That trust ceiling is the operating environment any advertiser is buying into when they place editorial-context campaigns. It is also the environment in which independent vertical and community publishers materially out-perform their share-of-readership: a finance independent is read by people making finance decisions, a men's lifestyle vertical by people in-market for lifestyle products, a LINA-member regional title by the local community an advertiser actually wants to reach. Contextual relevance, the metric that has quietly returned to the centre of post-cookie media planning, is the structural advantage of the independent sector.
What the outcomes actually look like
Industry-level data only takes the argument so far. The more important question is what shows up in post-campaign reporting.
A recent Brand Uplift Study run on a Man of Many campaign for a major global e-commerce platform delivered:
- +42.3% lift in actionable purchase intent
- -21.3% decrease in brand unfamiliarity
- +3.5% lift in brand consideration
- +3.1% lift in brand preference
All measured against a control. Those are the numbers that close the loop on whether media spend actually moved the dial inside an agency's brand-tracking framework, not just whether it generated impressions.
Across our 2024-2025 reader research, 82.6%of surveyed readers said they viewed featured brands more favourably after reading about them on the platform, 76.5% said they were more likely to purchase, and 44.7% had purchased a product they discovered through Man of Many content. That is the underlying audience behaviour the brand uplift outcomes sit on top of.
What the NBI signal means for 2026 planning
The NBI is, in effect, the Government telling platforms that supporting smaller Australian publishers is worth more in the tax base than supporting the majors. The advertising industry has spent two decades arguing that smart media spend follows the audience, not the masthead. The NBI is the clearest fiscal endorsement of that position the Australian regulatory system has ever produced, even though the offset itself sits with the platform rather than the buyer.
Three practical asks for agencies and brands.
First, audit your 2026 plan for the independent media share. If a meaningful slice of your Australian editorial spend isn't reaching DPA and LINA member publishers, you are over-indexed against the audience reality.
Second, look past CPM and raw audience size to engagement depth and post-campaign outcomes. Ask your independent partners for their brand uplift, purchase intent, and favourability data. Most have it. Compare the numbers to what your incumbent buys are actually delivering. The gap will frequently surprise you.
Third, build relationships directly. Independent publishers run lean teams. A direct conversation with a co-founder, editor, or commercial lead is generally the difference between a transactional buy and a meaningful editorial partnership. The execution speed is faster, the creative freedom is wider, and the brand-safety posture is, frankly, superior to the programmatic environments the same budgets often default to.
The NBI shifts the structural economics of Australian publishing in ways that will play out across the next decade. The platforms have a fiscal incentive to back independents. The advertisers that move with that signal, rather than waiting for it to play out, will look prescient. The ones that wait will look slow.
Read more
I've published two deeper analyses of the NBI draft on LinkedIn this week:
- Part 4: Australia's News Bargaining Incentive Is Almost the Right Answer. And That's the Problem. — what the draft actually does and where the gaps are
- Part 5: $200 Million In. 450 Journalists Out. Where Did the Money Actually Go? — why concentrating funding on the same incumbents failed last time, and three structural fixes for the new round
Submissions on both the Charge and Distribution bills close 18 May.
Scott Purcell, CFA, is Co-Founder of Man of Many, a 100% human-led, multi-award-winning Australian publisher and DPA member.