3 ms·
I think seeing this as an antagonistic situation between Google and the news sites is less than ideal. Google provides value to the news sites by driving traffi
by neil_s 6y ago
I think seeing this as an antagonistic situation between Google and the news sites is less than ideal. Google provides value to the news sites by driving traffic to them, and Publishers provide value to Google by helping provide more complete search results. If we could help the Publishers have more sustainable ways to make meaningful revenues off traffic once it visits the site, they wouldn't be trying to bite the arm that feeds them traffic. But instead of the news industry and the government trying to find ways to sustainably pay for news in an "information abundance" economy, they're turning their sights to a company that happens to have a large wallet but has already demonstrated it would get more value out of simply turning off news (like in Spain) than paying for the content because the fair value of showing the snippets or even the article links is far too low to it.
- curryst 6y agoUser generated content has vastly decreased the value proposition of newspapers. Looking at sites like Reddit, a lot of users read the headline, maybe skim the first paragraph or two of the article, and then go straight to the comments. Where people would once have read articles from multiple view points about a particular issue, they now read the headline and get opposing views in the comments. This is exacerbated by the fact that there are hundreds or thousands of news sources all paying someone to write an article about the same bit of information. The industry is going to end up collapsing to a much smaller number of organizations and they'll likely become profitable as the user views aren't split among so many sources.