A man uses a smartphone to photograph then-Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper at a rally in Fredericton, New Brunswick, October 16, 2015. REUTERS/Mark Blinch
Since May 2025, Canadian outlets have begun to receive their portion of the CAD 100 million that Google agreed to pay annually for an exemption from the Online News Act.
This piece of legislation, passed in 2023, aimed to rebalance the relationship between tech platforms and Canadian news organisations. Essentially, the law wants to make sure news outlets get paid when their work drives value for tech companies.
The Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC), an independent, federally incorporated nonprofit, distributes the funds following the rules set by the Canadian Parliament and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) when the law was passed.
Under the arrangement, Google committed to pay CAD 100 million annually from 2024. Starting this year, the CJC began distributing the funds for the first year. Subsequently, the fund will be distributed over five rounds of $100M each and news organizations have to submit documents proving eligibility each round.
While Australia and the EU have passed similar laws to make platforms pay for news, Canada’s is structurally distinct from decentralised, deal-by-deal approaches, as it mandates Google to make an annual CAD 100 million contribution, around $72 million in US dollars.
Two years after the legislation came into effect and a few months after Google started paying news publishers, I spoke with four outlets throughout Canada to see who are the winners and losers of the Online News Act.
The distribution of the CAD 100 million varies greatly: from millions of dollars to bigger outlets like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation or the media conglomerate Postmedia to hundreds of dollars to community weeklies and college radio stations.
Here’s how the system works. Some of the money is reserved for Canada's public broadcaster CBC and indigenous news organisations. The rest is distributed amongst the other outlets on the basis of the size of their newsrooms.
According to the CJC’s database, over 400 organisations have received money from the Online News Act.
Alfred Hermida, a digital media scholar and a professor at the University of British Columbia, generally thinks Google’s payouts to Canadian news publishers as a good thing, as more money is being injected into the news ecosystem. However, he said that the bill does not address the key issue, which is Google's dominance in the digital ad space.
In Canada, Google controls around 50% of the digital advertising market. If you add in Meta, both companies account for 80%.
“It's like a band-aid to journalism,” Hermida said. “The money is there based on reporting hours and aims to support reporting and journalism, which is great. But it doesn't help any of these organisations think about innovating and developing sustainable business models for the future.”
David Skok is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of The Logic, a Canadian outlet focusing on business and technology news who received CAD 170,000 from the Online News Act. He told me that the money is going towards the general support of their newsroom of 26 staff members as well as into the hiring of more journalists. The rest of their funding comes from individual subscriptions, group subscriptions and sponsorships and partnerships.
Skok was part of the contingent of publishers and journalists that lobbied in favour of the bill to be passed. They argued it would help level the playing field between publishers who previously secured undisclosed licensing agreements with Big Tech companies and those who were not invited to the table. In this instance, he said, the law has been successful.
He points out, however, that now AI platforms are doing the same: signing licensing deals with some big publishers while the rest are being left out in the cold.
“I just want to emphasise that all this reinforces the status quo,” says Skok. “The big newsrooms get bigger and the little ones get strangled, and that to me fundamentally is not good for a healthy competitive news environment. If you are in the business of producing high quality journalism, the more publications that are out there doing that, the better the work becomes.”
Jeanette Ageson is the publisher of The Tyee, an independent online news magazine from British Columbia who received CAD128,000 from the Online News Act. She told me the money will cover the rising operational costs for their staff of approximately 25 people and support a few new projects. The rest of their funding comes from a mix of subscriptions, donations and grants from the Canadian government.
Ageson highlighted a fundamental problem that the bill is trying to address: journalism is a public good vital for a functioning democracy, but its traditional funding mechanisms have collapsed. She pointed out that a significant portion of Canadians rely on foreign tech platforms for their information, yet these platforms wish to remain “completely unencumbered” from the responsibility of producing that information.
“If companies like Google and Facebook want to play that role in being a trusted information source and they want people to come to their platform, trust it and be doing good things with circulating information, I don’t think it’s a crazy idea that they should be expected to pitch in funding journalism,” she said.
Not all news publishers get to be part of the more than 400 recipients of Google's CAD 100 million. There are many eligibility criteria, including that an outlet is a real, Canadian news operation producing original, general-interest journalism that people can find on Google. You’ll find the rest of the criteria here.
Hermida thinks the CJC has done a decent job in their first year in terms of assessing who is eligible for the money and calculating how many reporting hours go into each outlet.
He points at The Conversation Canada, which he co-founded, as being denied qualified Canadian journalism organisation status because it relies on academics rather than traditional reporters. The CJC chose to apply a more flexible interpretation to receive Google funds with the argument that academic work involving interviews and ethnographic research is a form of original reporting.
“I would say that the CJC has taken a looser definition than the Online News Act does of who is eligible,” he says. “Some organisations are going to be left out, some will be included and there’s always going to be a debate over who should get this money.”
One of those outlets is IndigiNews, an independent digital news organisation doing journalism for Indigenous people, by Indigenous people. Publisher Eden Fineday explained to me that their outlet was deemed ineligible for the Google fund payout for 2023 and 2024 because of a bureaucratic crack: the money was directed to their former parent company rather than the newsroom itself. In late 2024, they became independent from their parent company, so when it became time to apply for the funds, it went to their parent company instead of going to them.
“It shouldn’t go to the owners. It should go to newsrooms. Why are we giving 4.2 million to Postmedia when they are owned by a hedge fund in the United States?” she said.
Fineday estimates that they would have received around CAD 55,000 roughly based on how CJC calculates the shares. For a newsroom that has a monthly operating budget of $50,000, that money would have gone a long way for them.
“We have always been very precariously funded. We are funded basically by charity: reader donations, grants and we have the Local Journalism Initiative for all three of our reporters,” she explains. “Everything – operations, my salary, the editor’s salary, all of the admin, all of the overheads – is paid for through charity.”
Montreal-based digital news outlet The Rover faced a similar bureaucratic obstacle when they tried to apply for a piece of Google funding. Founder Christopher Curtis started the venture during the pandemic with a network of freelance journalists. When it came to applying to the fund, he said, his organisation was informed that a key requirement for eligibility was having two full-time employees, which they technically didn’t have.
“[Managing Editor] Savannah Stewart owns 40% and I own 60% of The Rover. After our expenses, we split the money 60/40 but we are spending so much on freelancing that it’s not a ton of money,” he explains. “We didn’t have the infrastructure or the resources to make it official. It takes a long time and money to incorporate.”
To meet this criterion, Curtis and his colleague had to officially incorporate and become full-time employees, earning minimum wage despite their unpredictable funding. They are hoping that with these changes, they are able to qualify for the 2025 funding, which will not be distributed until next year.
“This whole thing has been a huge gift for foreign-owned legacy media and a spit in the face of small outlets like ours and Indigenous-owned outlets,” Curtis told me. “This whole system was designed for the big players and the papers who are dying and whose business model is failing. Some other small companies have managed to get a little bit of this money, but it doesn’t reflect the reality and the diversity of Canada and of journalists in Canada.”
Fineday, who is Indigenous herself, advocates for a separate fund, specifically for Indigenous media and managed by Indigenous people, with application processes and criteria designed by them. In the meantime, she also applied to be considered for the 2025 funding and is hoping they are able to receive it next year.
“I am grateful to every organisation that has decided to fund us, but I want the next generation to be able to talk to Native people and ask for money. That would be really good for their self-worth,” she said.
While Google did reach a deal with the government that resulted in the payouts, Meta refused to budge. As a result, for the past two years, Canadians have been effectively unable to access news content on Facebook and Instagram. However, according to our Digital News Report, 25% of respondents use Facebook as a source of news in 2025. The figure was 29% in 2023, before the ban. Colette Brin, one of the co-authors of the Canada chapter of the report explains these figures by pointing out that there are workarounds such as screenshot or link shorteners, people still discuss the news in comments or Facebook groups, and organisations and government authorities still posting releases or announcements.
“The survey question is phrased fairly broadly to include sharing and discussion of news-related topics, which might explain why Facebook is still considered a ‘news source’,” she explains.
Hermida estimates that news organisations have lost more than 85% of their engagement through Facebook. The reasons why the numbers above are somewhat consistent, he thinks, is because audiences think of news not as something that just necessarily comes from legacy media.
“For me the bigger issue with the Meta ban is that younger audiences don’t go to websites or legacy media. They rely more on social media and places like YouTube,” says Hermida. “If you are not present on Facebook and more importantly Instagram, what does that mean in the long term for that younger audience?”
So, with the loss of what was once an important source of traffic to news publishers, are news organisations bothered that Facebook and Instagram are gone?
The media managers I spoke to responded differently to this question. As we have reported in the past, the once-chummy relationship between social media platforms and news publishers is long gone, with most of Big Tech deliberately shifting away from news content.
Ageson from The Tyee told me that even before the ban, they were already experiencing a huge drop in referrals from Facebook. They used to have around 20% of their traffic coming from Facebook, a figure that started to shrink in 2022 and almost disappeared in 2023, right before the ban.
“The official block was more straightforward,” she says. “But in the year before the block, we had no idea where our Facebook traffic was going and it was only through quiet conversations with other publishers that we learned that everyone else was facing the same thing.”
Like many publishers around the world, The Tyee had already been refocusing their resources into connecting with audiences directly through newsletters and other channels. They are still sharing content in other platforms available in Canada, but chasing traffic through social media is no longer a main priority for them.
“We’ve learned that these platforms are always changing and you don’t have much control over their activities,” she says. “Their outcomes are not necessarily aligned with news publishers. So you shouldn’t build on rented land.”
Similarly, Skok from The Logic told me that one of the fundamental principles of his outlet was to not rely on ‘somebody else’s algorithm’ to promote their growth. Hence, the impact of Meta’s ban on them has been negligible since they have always shied away from chasing social clicks and SEO.
“If you are reliant on somebody else’s algorithm, which can change on a moment’s notice and has nothing to do with your incentives, that’s a very risky way to build a sustainable news organisation,” says Skok.
Unlike Skok and Ageson, Fineday from Indiginews and Curtis from The Rover told me that the news ban actually impacted them significantly as emerging news outlets and they both said they have figured out ways to somewhat work around the Meta news ban.
“We're spending CAD 16,000 to 20,000 a year on ads for Meta just for our stories to be visible,” said Fineday. “We are banned from Facebook unless we place an ad. So we are not actually banned. We just have to pay for it.”
Curtis, on the other hand, realised that Meta will not block their content as long as they do not point to links outside the platform. So they decided to create a new Instagram account. Rather than link to their pieces, they post videos and pictures. The account now has 16,000 followers and the videos get an average of 60,000 views.
“[Meta] inadvertently forced us to figure out a new strategy, and the failing of the federal government and Meta to come to some kind of an agreement actually worked out for us,” Curtis said.
While Ageson from The Tyee does not feel like Meta is necessary for the news ecosystem to function, she acknowledged the benefits it will bring Canadian society to have news be allowed on the platform.
She described the way a lot of people consume news as passive: they don’t seek it out; rather they wait for news to come to them as they listen to the radio or scroll online. As a number of Canadians still get their news on Meta platforms, she worries about the kind of news they are consuming there.
“Our shared reality could corrode even further,” she says. “From publishers’ business point of view, I feel confident that we don’t necessarily need Facebook and Meta to continue. But I do worry about the knowledge base of Canadians if news is never allowed back on Facebook, since a lot of people are still relying on that to understand what’s going on.”
The Google News Initiative is one of the funders of the Reuters Institute.
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