It has been a truly bizarre week when it comes to the news industry. The week began with the French government threatening to charge Google for indexing the content of their major news publications. A similar argument has been made by the Brazilian news industry. Their main industry trade body recommended members blocked Google News from carrying their content, a move which their members were only too happy to support.
“Staying with Google News was not helping us grow our digital audiences, on the contrary,” said the association’s president, Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto.
“By providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites,” he said, in an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
It’s a decision that I frankly can’t quite get my head around. Google are indexing and providing access to the publishers content completely free of charge. They then advertise that content to millions of users via either the main search engine or via Google News, again free of charge. Google themselves report that over a billion clicks are sent to news sites from Google News, with your humble blogger an avid user of the service.
So I’m struggling to see how the service offered by Google is in any way negative, much less the stealing of content that the French and Brazilians seem to think it is. They seem to be failing to appreciate that for many consumers of news, especially of a younger demographic, search engines are their first means of finding and accessing news. If you’re not present then you may as well not exist.
Of course if publishers leave en masse then that may be enough to force a change of habits, but forcing users to change something they willingly love doing just so they can fit into your model of news delivery is incredibly short-sighted.
It's understandable: media does not make a living by publishing news or from increased news exposure, they do so by showing ads. If Google ranks and shows part of the article the reader doesn't need waste time in going to the original news site anymore – and more importantly won't see the ads there.
Google also doesn't like it if other sites run automated searches and take samples of their top search results for queries, in fact they blocked several sites that did so.The similar attitude from news media shouldn't come as a surprise to them.
Sure, I get that there are commercial realities for any online publisher, but I'm not sure Google News stops people from clicking through. If an article isn't adding value apart from the 1-2 lines you see in Google News (or the main Google search results) then it doesn't really deserve much success imo. If the publisher has their wits about them they'll use those few lines to pre-sell the article and get more people clicking through. Increasingly now people will go to an aggregator for breaking news or onto Twitter. Burying heads in the sand won't help publishers adapt to the demands of modern readers.
Very odd imo. How much free traffic do they get from the search engines? Bet it's far more than they'd ever potentially lose by people reading the snippet and deciding the article wasn't worth reading.
This is interesting. It is the case, in my view, that people just pay attention to headlines so in a way I think it's admirable that someone is saying 'enough. If you really want to get the proper story you have to read the whole lot'. And trust the French to do that – that is right up their rue and I don't disrespect them for that!!
Check out this interview with Clayton Christensen Robert. He's very well respected for his work on innovation and how disruptive innovation affects an industry.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2012/10/clay-christensen…
"First, focus on the jobs that your customers are hiring you to do — and on new ones that you might be in a good position to do. Successful companies often value elements of their products that audiences don’t particularly care about; getting too much distance between those two perceptions leads to business failure.
And second, create a separate business focused on taking advantage of the disruption — and give it permission to outcompete and outperform its parent, even to run it out of business. Disrupt yourself before someone else disrupts you."
Banning Google is not going to stop the desire of people to see all the news stories on a particular topic and/or a particular day gathered together, with sources compiled from all news sources. That cat is out of the bag. The industry has shown that people don't mind paying for exceptional content, with publications like the Economist and the FT doing well, but for mediocre news footage that is available in hundreds of other places, I'm afraid the news industry is going to have to raise their game.
By blaming Google they're ignoring their own very large failings. Personally I'd like to see Google dump them from both News and Search indexes. Sure they'd soon find out just how valuable Google were to them then.
This shows how they want to change the scene for their own mean objectives. Great article.
What's amazing to me about this is that any news publisher can remove themselves from Google listings by using the robots.txt; i.e. they don't have to be included in Google's search results.
Doesn't this render these lawsuits entirely moot?
Does anyone in these governments even know how to work a computer?
Quite. Of course the French approach is slightly different in that they want to remain in the index (and get the free traffic), but they want Google to pay for the privilege of having their news sites in their index.
Think they could be in for a long wait.
I don't get this at all. They get free traffic from Google right? Who would not want that?
Well Pierre Rolland and Google chairman Eric Schmidt met yesterday to try and resolve this issue, but Rolland was adament that this law will go ahead, and Google should pay publishers to send them traffic. Absolutely staggering lack of understanding by the French president. Hopefully Google will tell them where they can stick their free traffic.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/c…
So let’s say that the newspapers win and now Google has to pay the publishers in order to put a link on their website when someone searches for that publisher’s name. Google drops all the newspapers from their search engine and now the newspapers lose any traffic that would have come to their site through any search engine. Which I would imagine would be most of it. Then once they realize they have no traffic at all and can’t get any ad revenue from their own site they go back to Google and say “We will let you link our site for free.” Now we are back to the original situation except that both companies have to pay lawyers to deal with the contracts of linking for free.
Think you've hit the nail on the head Bryan. Crazy situation.
This seems so backwards; there was once a day (and I thought it was still that day) that magazines and newspapers published their stories on their websites and were THRILLED to have Google/Google News list the article with a few lines of text for users to see. Why would the papers try to change that? Google likely won’t pay, which means the stories won’t appear in the links, which means that the paper’s website will have fewer visits, and thus facilitate the paper going bankrupt at an even faster pace than they already are.
The telling thing is Matty that in France not a single publisher actually makes a profit. The industry there gets something like $1 billion in state subsidies each year and still can't make any money.
The value of print advertising has dropped by around 50% in the last few years and publishers are flailing around looking for someone to blame.
The really mad thing about this is that if these publishers are right, it makes a mockery of Google's entire business model. They exist on the premise that clicks on Google search results are valuable enough for companies to pay money to them for their ads to appear there.
Not only do publishers want these listings for free, they actually want Google to pay THEM. It's hard to imagine how they could be any more wrong.
Quite. Thanks for the comment William.
Well it seems to be working!!
http://paidcontent.org/2012/12/13/did-google-pay-…
Sounds really funny to me! All these years, news publishers wanted to stay on top of Google News results and suddenly they realized that it is not helping them any more.
Well, as a news publisher customer, I don't want to read the whole journalism junk. I'm pretty much satisfied with the headlines and the short descriptions found in Google news. If I find something interesting, I may click and read in depth.
If there was no Google news, I wouldn't have even know that your news paper existed. So get used to it news publishers. If you don't like it getting indexed, make the necessary steps to get deindexed.