When Waleed Aly penned his reluctant farewell to The Project this week, he wasn’t just mourning the end of a television show. He was documenting the latest casualty in a broader media apocalypse that has been unfolding for over two decades. The collapse of free-to-air television’s advertising model bears striking similarities to an earlier media catastrophe: the death of newspaper classified advertising, once famously dubbed the “rivers of gold” by media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Both stories follow an eerily similar script. Traditional media companies built their empires on what seemed like unassailable revenue streams, only to watch helplessly as digital platforms systematically dismantled their business models. The parallels are so precise they read like a playbook for creative destruction in the digital age.
The newspaper industry’s “rivers of gold” were its classified advertisements—those dense pages of job listings, real estate sales, and personal ads that readers might have skipped but advertisers paid handsomely to place. In 2002, Australian newspapers captured 96% of all classified advertising revenue, worth $1.6 billion. By 2018, that figure had collapsed to just $200 million. The culprits were digital platforms like Seek for jobs, Domain and realestate.com.au for property, and eBay and Gumtree for general goods. These platforms didn’t just compete with newspapers; they obliterated them by offering superior targeting, searchability, and user experience.
Today’s free-to-air television faces an almost identical threat. As Aly astutely observes, the problem isn’t primarily about content quality or even audience numbers. Television ratings have begun to stabilise, yet revenue continues to plummet. The real issue is that social media giants like Meta and Google have created advertising products so sophisticated, so precisely targeted through data harvesting, that traditional television advertising looks primitive by comparison.
The mechanism of destruction is remarkably similar in both cases. Digital platforms didn’t succeed by creating better content—few would argue that Facebook posts rival quality journalism or that YouTube videos match television production values. Instead, they succeeded by creating better advertising products. Classified websites offered searchable databases instead of static newspaper pages. Social media platforms offered micro-targeting based on personal data instead of broad demographic assumptions.
What makes these parallel collapses particularly tragic is their speed and totality. Newspapers had decades to adapt to the internet’s rise, yet most failed to recognise the existential threat until their classified revenues had already evaporated. Television networks, despite witnessing the newspaper industry’s demise, seem equally unprepared for their own digital reckoning. The announcement of pay cuts for television stars this week suggests the industry is still in reactive mode, cutting costs rather than fundamentally reimagining its value proposition.
The deeper concern, as Aly rightly identifies, lies not in the fate of any particular media company but in the concentration of power these disruptions have created. The same handful of tech giants that captured newspaper classified revenues now dominate television advertising. This consolidation represents more than market efficiency; it’s a fundamental shift in how information flows through society.
When newspapers lost their classified advertising, they lost more than revenue—they lost their economic independence. Many became dependent on the very platforms that had destroyed their business models, forced to distribute content through Facebook and Google to reach audiences. Television networks face the same Faustian bargain, increasingly reliant on social media for audience engagement while watching those same platforms capture their advertising dollars.
The most chilling aspect of both stories is how little resistance traditional media mounted. Newspapers largely stood by as Craigslist, eBay, and local classified sites carved up their most profitable segments. Television networks have similarly watched as YouTube, TikTok, and streaming services captured younger audiences without mounting any meaningful counteroffensive.
Perhaps the real lesson from these twin collapses isn’t about the inevitability of technological disruption, but about the dangers of complacency in the face of existential threats. Both newspapers and television had decades of warning, yet both industries seemed to believe their revenue streams were too fundamental, too embedded in the fabric of society, to simply disappear.
As we witness the final chapters of free-to-air television’s golden age, we’re not just watching the end of an entertainment medium—we’re seeing the completion of a digital revolution that began with those first classified ads migrating online. The rivers of gold that once sustained both industries have been permanently diverted, flowing now toward Silicon Valley’s coffers, leaving traditional media to navigate an increasingly arid landscape.