5 ms·

Google is the biggest and most direct threat to the publisher model. Publishers don't earn (good) money off social traffic, it's just not what advertisers pay

• AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  The biggest and most direct threat to the publisher model is other publishers. Publishing used to be hugely profitable because you needed a printing press or a big radio tower, which cost a million dollars, which made it rare and therefore valuable. If you wanted to advertise there weren't that many publishers to choose from in a given market, so they got to charge high rates. Then the internet smashed the economics of that to smithereens. The New York Times now has to compete with your blog. And your blog doesn't have that much traffic, but the sum total of all blogs and social media actually does, so the number of ad dollars going to traditional publishers has gone way down. People always point to Google because they sell advertising and get their cut when they do. But the thing Google replaced isn't publishers, it's ad sales reps, and nobody weeps for them. The "loss" isn't the commission going to Google instead of some ad rep, it's the tiny amounts each going to millions of bloggers which used to get summed up and pay the salaries of thousands of reporters. Which is why the publishers are willing to resort to underhanded dirty tricks as they did to get the EU copyright directive -- because their goal is to shut down all of this user generated content which competes with them for lucrative eyeballs.