Man of Many has called for structural amendments to the government’s News Bargaining Incentive (NBI).
The independent men’s lifestyle publisher has warned that the new NBI, under its current structure, will likely benefit the same legacy conglomerates—ABC News, News Australia, Nine and Seven West Media—that used the original $200 million in annual News Media
Bargaining Code payments for “share buybacks and acquisitions while cutting 450 journalists”.
Under the government’s NBI proposal, the government will pin a 2.25 per cent tax on the revenue of the three tech companies if they do not negotiate deals with publishers worth 1.5 per cent of their turnover. The money provided to publishers would be tax deductible.
Man Of Many co-founder and director Scott Purcell said that Google and Meta currently capture 81 percent of Australia’s digital advertising market and both companies book the bulk of those Australian-earned revenues offshore.
“The NBI’s 2.25 percent levy is, in effect, a partial recapture of value that already left the country. The argument is not whether platforms should pay. The argument is whether the recaptured revenue funds Australian journalism, or tops up the balance sheets of the four conglomerates that already dominate what is left of it,” he said.
Purcell argues that the same four media conglomerates that absorbed roughly 60 to 70 percent of the original NMBC pool —ABC, News Australia, Nine and Seven West Media, will absorb the bulk of the new one, because under the current structure a platform with $100 million NBI liability can hit full offset by routing $25 million each to four publishers.
“The same four absorb the residual through FTE-weighted distribution. We have receipts on what the original recipients did with their cheques: News Corp’s parent ran a US$1 billion buyback, Nine acquired QMS Media for $850 million, and the three commercial recipients cut more than 450 journalists in 2024 alone,” Purcell added.
“Australia is already among the most concentrated media markets in the developed world. A regime that flows $200 to $250 million a year to publishers who already control 90 percent of metropolitan print and 84 percent of newspaper revenue is amplifying concentration with public-purpose money.”
Man of Many proposes three major amendments that would close the gap between the policy’s stated intent and its likely real-world effect:
- Close the AI/LLM exemption: Charge Bill clause 9 explicitly excludes services provided solely or primarily by large language models from the definition of internet search engine service. This exempts ChatGPT, Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claude and AI-only successors from the regime entirely, despite AI summarisation being the principal mechanism of contemporary value extraction from publisher content. Industry data points to median referral traffic declines of 20 to 60 per cent directly attributable to AI search features. The definition should be technology-neutral: if a service generates revenue from Australian users above the $250 million threshold and uses Australian publisher content to serve those users, it should be in scope.
- Add a 10 per cent single-recipient cap, and a 30 per cent Independent Diversity Floor: A 10 per cent cap on the distribution pool, tighter than the Charge Bill’s 25 per cent offset cap, prevents the FTE formula from concentrating funding on the same legacy newsrooms. A 30 per cent floor reserved for publishers with revenue under $50 million provides a structural minimum allocation for the SME tier. PIJI’s research framework, already cited in Treasury’s own consultation paper, is the reference for defining qualifying public-interest journalism.
- Mandate use-of-funds reporting: All recipients of NBI distributions above the minimum threshold should publish annual reports disclosing the proportion allocated to journalist salaries, technology and audience development, executive compensation, and capital management activities. Without this, the regime asks Australians to fund publishers on trust, with five years of evidence that trust is misplaced. Man of Many’s submission proposes a JobKeeper-style verification mechanism requiring payroll evidence that funds have flowed through to journalism salaries.
Man of Many would like the AMCA to broaden the diversity of publishers that are eligible to receive payments if tech platforms opt to pay the levy rather than negotiate a deal with publishers. Currently there are only 83 publishers listed on ACMA’s New Media Bargaining Code Register, despite ACMA acknowledging 2,730 professional news outlets operate in Australia.
Man of Many said that its own ACMA registration, alongside Broadsheet and Urban List, were revoked from the register in January 2026 in spite of meeting the six eligibility criteria.
“If ACMA registration remains the sole distribution-side gate, and platforms refuse to negotiate deals, the independent sector is excluded from the only live mechanism by which levy revenue reaches publishers,” Man of Many stated.
“Man of Many acknowledges the constructive elements of the NBI design, including the universal levy structure that closes the Meta withdrawal loophole, the 170 per cent SME offset rate that makes deals with independent publishers more tax-efficient than deals with incumbents, and the anti-avoidance provisions modelled on Part IVA of the Income Tax Assessment Act.
“The 170 per cent SME offset is a genuine opportunity for platforms. Deals across the long tail of independent publishers are now structurally more cost-effective than ever. The opportunity is to build a portfolio of Australian publisher relationships that reflects the actual diversity of the Australian market, rather than minimising compliance through four large deals with incumbents.”
Man of Many said that its position aligns with a joint statement issued by the Local and Independent News Association (LINA), the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA), the Digital Publishers Alliance DPA and allied organisations.
