In South Africa, a significant portion of residents get their news via YouTube and TikTok, rates among the highest on the continent according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026. But this shift is not an African exception. For the first time in 2026, social networks and video platforms surpass all other news sources globally (television, news websites, applications) with 54% of global audiences turning to them. The massive migration toward algorithmic platforms is redistributing advertising revenue toward individual creators, draining the budgets of newsrooms that fund investigative journalism.

The Essentials

  • Social networks and video platforms are now the primary news source worldwide, used by 54% of audiences according to the Reuters Institute 2026: a historic first.
  • In South Africa, 42% of residents get their news via YouTube and 33% via TikTok, among the highest rates on the continent.
  • Advertising revenue is migrating toward platforms and individual creators, depriving newsrooms of resources to fund investigative reporting and on-the-ground correspondents.
  • Google has established a support fund for South African media of R688 million (approximately 40 million USD), signaling an awareness of the problem, but this is conditional and non-structural financing.
  • The OTT market is expected to gain 1.4 million new subscribers in South Africa by 2029 according to PwC, deepening the fragmentation between entertainment consumption and news consumption.

A Global Shift, Accelerated in the Global South

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, based on nearly 100,000 interviews conducted in 48 countries, documents a structural turning point: for the first time, social networks and video platforms surpass both television and news websites and applications in weekly audience reach. This threshold, observed long as a horizon, has now been crossed. Globally, 30% of respondents say that social networks and video platforms are their primary news source, compared with 22% five years ago.

The phenomenon is particularly pronounced among young people: more than half of 18-24 year-olds say that platforms, social networks, or AI chatbots constitute their main access to news. But the geography of the shift is equally revealing. In two-thirds of the markets covered by the report (primarily in the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia), social networks and video platforms are already more used than news websites. Europe resists more, but with significant exceptions. Content creators are particularly popular in Global South countries: Asia, Africa, and Latin America dominate the ranking of markets where their influence is strongest.

This dynamic is unevenly distributed, but it follows a common logic: wherever mobile infrastructure deployed rapidly and access costs fell, the platformization of news has progressed fastest. South Africa is the most documented laboratory for the African continent. It prefigures what other markets will experience in coming years, as mobile coverage extends. Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana are following comparable trajectories, with a few years’ lag. But Brazil, Indonesia, and the Philippines are in a structurally similar situation.

South Africa, a Case Study of Media Shift

The country combines conditions that accelerate digital transition. One of sub-Saharan Africa’s highest smartphone penetration rates, a connected urban middle class, and data costs that have fallen significantly since 2020. The result is visible in Reuters Institute figures: South Africa shows platform usage rates as news sources that exceed those of many European countries. A significant portion of South Africans get their news via TikTok, a channel whose algorithm optimizes for emotional engagement, not factual accuracy.

The central mechanism is economic before it is cultural. Platforms have broken the advertising model on which African private media built their viability since the end of single-party regimes. In the 1990s and 2000s, the rise of independent press in South Africa (the Mail & Guardian, Business Day, the Daily Maverick later) rested on the ability to aggregate local audiences that advertisers paid to reach. This logic is now short-circuited. Advertisers follow audiences to YouTube and TikTok.

Individual creators capture the profit. Newsrooms remain with the fixed costs of professional journalism without corresponding revenues.

The Algorithm as De Facto Editor-in-Chief

We must understand what the algorithm does to journalism before measuring its institutional consequences. TikTok, YouTube, and their equivalents optimize for watch time and share rate. These metrics structurally favor certain types of content: emotion over analysis, confirmation over nuance, personal narrative over investigative reporting. A creator recounting their day or commenting dramatically on a political statement systematically outperforms a journalist spending twenty minutes explaining a budget report.

This algorithmic bias is not politically neutral, and its effects far exceed Africa. According to Emarketer, Meta and Google together capture approximately 53% of global digital advertising spending in 2026, and 62% with Amazon, leaving local newsrooms (whether in Johannesburg, Jakarta, or Lima) competing for scraps from a market over which they have lost structural control. In Indonesia, an analysis by the Alliance of Independent Journalists documented that 60% of local media abandoned their investigative sections over five years due to lack of a viable economic model facing this asymmetric competition.

In South Africa, where issues like corruption in public procurement, the state of Eskom’s finances, or interethnic tensions are real governance matters, a newsroom’s capacity to fund months of investigation directly determines the quality of public debate. The Daily Maverick, founded in 2009, built its model around investigation and membership. Its Scorpio unit revealed some of the country’s most thoroughly documented corruption cases. This model exists, it works, but it is fragile, and its survival depends on a subscriber base that platforms directly compete for in terms of attention and available time.

The fragmentation of news toward algorithmic channels has effects that are beginning to be measured. An article published in our pages on the fragmentation of news and the fracturing of democracy documents how media disintermediation produces segmented public spheres where established facts lose their shared status. This phenomenon overlaps, in South Africa, with already deep racial, linguistic, and economic divides. It takes other forms elsewhere (political polarization in Europe, community fragmentation in Southeast Asia) but the underlying mechanism is identical.

The Google Fund and Its Structural Limitations

The most visible response to the financing problem came from Google. The company announced a R688 million fund, approximately 40 million USD, intended to support South African media, as part of a settlement concluded with South Africa’s Competition Commission following its investigation into digital platforms. This is a significant signal: for the first time, a major technology platform explicitly acknowledges its responsibility in the erosion of local media’s economic models.

The fund’s allocation conditions remain opaque: beneficiaries and selection criteria are not made public. Conditional financing granted by the platform that contributed to destroying traditional advertising revenues creates a structural dependency likely to weigh on editorial freedom.

No serious newsroom easily forgoes vital financing, even when that financing comes from an entity it might have to cover critically.

Google’s initiative is part of a broader movement. In Australia, the 2021 News Media Bargaining Code forced Google and Meta to negotiate agreements with local publishers, injecting hundreds of millions of Australian dollars into the sector. In Canada, Bill C-18 followed comparable logic, not without tensions: Meta temporarily blocked access to news content on its Canadian platforms in response. In 2025, the suspension of USAID funding constituted a shock of a different nature: according to data reported by the Global Investigative Journalism Network, 28 million dollars in grants intended to support investigative journalism in Southern, Eastern, and Western Africa had been frozen, highlighting the fragility of hybrid models dependent on cycles of foreign subsidies. These precedents show that negotiation is possible, but it requires firm political will and a balance of power that few governments (African or otherwise) have today the means or intention to build.

Models That Resist and What Makes Them Possible

The picture is not uniformly dark. Several actors, across different continents, have developed strategies that merit documentation for what they reveal about the conditions for success.

The Daily Maverick is the most studied case on the African continent. Its Maverick Insider model, membership with voluntary and then paid contributions, enabled it to finance Scorpio and maintain a newsroom of significant size. In 2023, the publication claimed more than 30,000 paying members. This figure remains modest on the scale of a country of 60 million inhabitants, but it proves that an educated urban audience is willing to pay for journalism it considers a public good. The condition is trust: the Daily Maverick built this trust over years of documented investigation and editorial transparency.

In Lagos, the digital journal Premium Times followed a comparable trajectory, financing its investigative journalism through a combination of membership, grants from philanthropic foundations, and partnerships with development organizations. In Indonesia, the media outlet Tempo collaborates with regional newsrooms to pool the distribution of investigations into corruption: a network model that compensates for individual resource weakness. In Latin America, nonprofit independent media rely primarily on grants; commercial actors still largely depend on algorithmic advertising. This hybridization of financing is fragile (it depends on subsidy cycles and decisions by foreign foundations) but it maintains investigative capacity that the pure advertising model can no longer guarantee.

These experiences point toward the structural conditions for success. First, an audience with sufficient disposable income to consider membership. Next, an editorial credibility track record that justifies the price.

Finally, a legal environment that protects journalists: where the press is subject to judicial or physical pressures, alternative economic models are insufficient to guarantee newsroom survival. The South African National Editors’ Forum (SANEF) regularly documents the pressures that investigative journalists face, including strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) filed by economic and political actors implicated in reports. The phenomenon is far from uniquely South African: in Southern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Central America, SLAPPs represent a growing threat documented by press freedom organizations.

The regulatory dimension is therefore inseparable from the economic dimension. A solid legal framework (source protection, access to information, limitations on abusive suits) is a prerequisite for any viable economic model for investigative journalism.

OTT Growth Changes the Equation

PwC’s projections add a layer of complexity. The arrival of 1.4 million new streaming service subscribers projected for South Africa by 2029 accelerates the fragmentation of leisure and news time. Netflix, Showmax, and Amazon Prime compete with news media for the fundamental resource: an individual’s available attention after their workday. This phenomenon is global: the battle for the four to five daily hours individuals devote to their smartphones is the terrain on which streaming platforms, social networks, and news media now clash.

This competition for attention is an issue that journalism struggles to articulate clearly, because it requires thinking of the sector not as an information market but as a segment of a larger attention market. Streaming platforms do not produce disinformation and do not destroy democracy directly. But they mechanically reduce the time available to consume serious news: a diffuse effect, difficult to measure, potentially significant over the long term.

OTT growth also opens, conversely, opportunities for long-form journalism formats. The investigative documentary, the complex-narrative podcast series, the in-depth video format: these formats find audiences on the same platforms that capture advertising revenue. A few newsrooms are exploring this path, in Africa as in Europe and Asia: the documentary as a product distributable on YouTube or local streaming platforms, monetized through licenses or production subsidies. This is still a fragile bet, but one worth watching.

What Information Public Space by 2035

A society that gets its news primarily through engagement algorithms must preserve the functions that investigative journalism serves for democracy: checks on power, fact verification, and crisis contextualization. The question arises today in the same terms in São Paulo, Manila, Nairobi, and Budapest: even if available institutional responses vary considerably.

Two trajectories are plausible by the 2030-2035 horizon, and available signals today allow us to distinguish them without predicting them.

The first trajectory is durable fragmentation in which an educated urban minority finances quality investigative journalism through membership models, while the majority of the population gets its news from algorithmic flows whose informational quality is random. This bifurcation reproduces, in the news domain, the access inequalities observed in other sectors: health, education, justice. It is not unique to Africa. Reuters Institute 2026 data shows that the share of “news lovers” (those who consume news regularly and with interest) fell from 29% to 22% of respondents since 2021, while “casual users” grew from 16% to 25%. This shift is observed in nearly all covered markets.

In this scenario, investigative journalism survives, documents, and contributes to accountability, but loses its function as a universal public good to become an elite consumer good. Collective decisions are then made in a space where a large portion of citizens has less verified, less contextualized, and more emotionally charged information.

The second trajectory passes through active regulation and structural financing mechanisms. It assumes that governments (African, Asian, Latin American) or regional coalitions equip themselves with instruments comparable to what Australia and Canada have experimented with: requiring platforms to compensate news content producers, independent public funds modeled on Scandinavian or Canadian frameworks, tax reforms targeting advertising revenue captured by platforms to reinject it into the local media ecosystem. This trajectory is politically difficult. It assumes political will to regulate technology actors on whom many governments depend for digital infrastructure, and against whom the balance of power is structurally unfavorable: even more so in Global South economies.

Perhaps the most important signal to follow is the evolution of local content policies imposed on platforms. Several African countries, and also Southeast Asian countries, are negotiating or have negotiated with YouTube and TikTok requirements for moderation in local languages and promotion of local producers. If these negotiations result in financing obligations, they could create regional precedents comparable to Australian agreements. The African Union theoretically has a mandate to coordinate these negotiations at the continental level: a resource largely underutilized. ASEAN and CELAC could play equivalent roles in their respective zones, if political will could muster the means.

Google’s R688 million fund constitutes more of an admission than a solution: the platform acknowledges a debt to the media ecosystem it contributed to destabilizing. The real scope of this acknowledgment depends on its translation into structural commitments rather than a public relations operation. Newsrooms that navigate this transition (in Johannesburg, Lagos, Jakarta, or Bogotá) will be those that negotiated guarantees of editorial independence in these partnerships and publicly documented their terms. Credibility, as the Daily Maverick has demonstrated, is the only asset that platforms cannot replicate algorithmically.

Sources

  1. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, Executive Summary, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026/dnr-executive-summary
  2. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, South Africa, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026/south-africa
  3. Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, Broadcast, streaming and platforms, https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026/broadcast-streaming-platforms-changing-landscape-news-video
  4. PwC Africa Entertainment & Media Outlook 2025-2029, PricewaterhouseCoopers (annual report, available at pwc.com/africa)
  5. SANEF South Africa Digital News Landscape 2025, South African National Editors’ Forum (sanef.org.za)
  6. Daily Maverick, Maverick Insider Model, public data available at dailymaverick.co.za
  7. Premium Times Nigeria, Hybrid Financing Data, premiumtimesng.com
  8. News Media Bargaining Code (Australia, 2021), Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, accc.gov.au
  9. Global Investigative Journalism Network, “The USAID Crisis and Funding the Future of Independent Media”, gijn.org, February 2025
  10. Frontiers in Communication, “The algorithmic trap: how social media monetization undermines investigative journalism in local media”, 2025, doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1619367