The Project and Q&A programs tanked by 'youth exodus' as Big Tech shifts the Australian media industry into another gear

Sky News AU

6 days ago

Australia's media industry, once a vibrant tapestry of nightly news, gritty dramas, and unifying sports broadcasts, is at a crossroads – caught in a digital storm that is challenging its economic and cultural core.
The cancellation of once iconic shows like Network 10's The Project and the ABC's Q+A this month, along with Foxtel's 3.4 billion AUD takeover by global streaming giant DAZN in April are signals of a seismic shift.
Three forces drive this upheaval: a youth exodus away from traditional media consumption, Big Tech's stranglehold, and hyper competition in content creation, a once highly barriered industry. The Great Youth Exodus
Young Australians (4–17 and 18–39), in-line with their counterparts around the world, are abandoning traditional television for digital ecosystems at an exponential pace.
OzTAM data shows a 75–80 per cent drop in free-to-air (FTA) viewership among youth from 2009 to 2024, with primetime audiences skewing over 50.
More fundamentally, they are leaving not only for television-style content on other distribution channels, but for alternative forms of entertainment altogether.
A 2024 ACMA report estimates of the ~30 hours of weekly leisure time available to 16–24-year-olds, only ~2 hours (7 per cent) are spent on FTA/cable (Seven, Nine, Foxtel), down from 10 in 2010, and 27 per cent spent on television-style content through streaming services.
The remaining 65 per cent of youth leisure time is spent scrolling through YouTube and Social Media feeds, playing video games, listening to podcasts and shopping online.
This is a fundamental reset of the role of television in society altogether.
Once the glowing hearth of family nights and personal escapism - perhaps most vividly immortalised in Back to the Future's 1955 Baines household - television has been dethroned from its former cultural supremacy, with few exceptions.
This is certainly a core reason behind The Project's ratings collapse from 1.1 million in 2010 to 238,000 to 357,000 in 2024, and Q+A's decline from 0.5 million to 0.3 million over the same time period.
Let's drill down further into what this has meant for top-rated television shows in Australia.
All top-rated programs across the key categories of Sports, News and Entertainment have lost ratings over the past fifteen years.
One notable exception to this trend has been Sky News Australia's 'after dark' programming, which has steadily grown over this period, demonstrating its value in serving demand for conservative commentary on the news (disclosure: I appear on Sky News Australia's evening lineup three times a week and it is the owner of this site).
Meanwhile, streaming content – whether global like Squid Games and The Rings of Power or Australian originals like Boy Swallows Universe – not even on the map in 2010 now command ratings that rival AFL and NRL Grand Finals. Big Tech's Stranglehold and Australia's Unique Disadvantage
Big Tech has been both the cause and the beneficiary of this great youth exodus to other forms of digital media and entertainment as demonstrated in their growth from zero to over USD six trillion in market cap in a quarter century – a rise never before seen in human history.
The most dramatic consequence of this is seen in the traditional ad apocalypse catalysed by Big Tech's grip.
Google and Meta now capture 65–70 per cent of Australia's AUD 16.4 billion digital ad market, up from ~40 per cent in 2015.
Meanwhile television ad revenue (FTA and Cable) fell from AUD 5.0 billion to AUD 4.3 billion over the same period, as advertisers increasingly favour digital advertising over traditional television advertising in their budget mix.
On the consumer revenue side, Australian consumers spent 11 per cent more with the two global juggernaut streaming platforms, Netflix and Amazon Prime, from 2010 to today (AUD 1.3 to 2.1 billion).
Leading Australian digital platforms - Stan, Kayo and Binge - have also demonstrated strong growth over the same period (AUD 548 million to 1.5 billion, or 17 per cent CAGR), but it must be noted that the growth of Kayo and Binge is offset by proportional declines in Foxtel's non-streaming revenue over the same period (Foxtel is the owner of Kayo and Binge).
Australia is uniquely disadvantaged in this media industry arms race.
Its position as an English-speaking market with limited scale makes it destined to be more of a 'franchisee' rather than a head-to-head competitor in the globalised media and entertainment industry.
Government policies such as the 40 per cent producer offset and subsidies like Screen Australia's grants may help on the margins but they lag US tax breaks (e.g., California's 25 per cent credit) and other economies of scale advantages.
Content Hyper-Competition and Saturation
These market dynamics have also led to a second-order effect of a content explosion that has created a hyper-competitive landscape for creators coupled with diminished economies of scale due to the highly fragmented audience structure this has enabled.
Netflix alone is on track to release ~500 original series in 2025, over 10 times as many as in 2015.
Not to mention the explosion of user-generated content (UGC) on platforms like YouTube (1.5 billion videos in 2025, up from 300 million in 2015) and TikTok (~2 billion, up from 10 million), and independent podcasters like Joe Rogan (15m+ listeners per episode) also competing directly for eyeballs and attention.
This hyper-competitive environment with drastically varied cost structures across UGC and Big Tech juggernauts, further squeezes Australian production competitiveness from both ends.
If current trends continue, Big Tech will dominate over 70 per cent of Australia's ad spend and ~65 per cent of Australian consumer revenue by 2030.
To compete, Australian media must innovate – thinking outside the norms of the last decade that resulted in show concepts like The Project and Q&A.
One example of this would be: Leveraging AI (e.g., AI-assisted script writing and editing, and CGI visual generation) to slash production costs and accelerate delivery to leapfrog over the traditional Hollywood model of production and better compete with Silicon Valley studios.
Or we could Identify and double-down on defensible localised niches like outback true crime (Snowtown) or sports underdog tales (The Test).
Advocating policies like increased tax credits or relaxed quotas – and considering a radical rethink: defunding the ABC's AUD 1.1 billion budget to instead create a media venture fund and/or generous tax credit scheme to spur individual creators and private media startups in what has quickly become a golden age for new media entrepreneurship.
The events of the last couple of weeks with high-profile cancellations, against the backdrop of Big Tech's structural advantage overall and in the Australian market in particular, reveals what time it is for the Australian media industry.
The question that remains is: Will Australian media harness AI, own valuable storytelling niches, and pursue policy reform to forge defensible strongholds?
Or will it succumb, and accept its fate as a mere franchisee of global giants by 2030?
Kosha Gada is a tech entrepreneur who also serves as a board member of sports betting platform PointsBet. She is a broadcast commentator on US and international current affairs, appearing live three nights a week on Sky News Australia