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Google is giving $1B to publishers to help convince governments not to take more
- ricardo81 6y agoI won't pretend to be an expert on big business and the answers to the problems of users expecting free, but I will say that initially Google had a good symbiotic relationship with publishers and that it no longer exists. News publishers, webmasters suffering lower CTR due to G properties in SERPs, ads placing organic results below the fold, rich snippets taking content from pages to prevent a click through to the site. That kind of thing. It is/was all a bit insidious and now time is being called on it, they seem to be relenting, a bit, at least on face value.
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- MaKey 6y agoWithout Google those sites would lose the majority of their visitors, so what is the point you're trying to get across?
- ricardo81 6y agoGoogle has a search monopoly in many countries. Are you implying that if Google did not exist, no one would visit websites any more, or read the news? They were originally a search engine to find other things on the web, not so much a portal.
- pferde 6y agoIn fact, that's how Google got their initial foot in the proverbial door - by being just a search engine, and presenting a clean landing page with essentially just the search textbox, at the time when incumbents (Yahoo, Altavista, ...) had their landing pages crowded with news and advertisements so much that the actual search box would get lost in there.
- MaKey 6y agoNo, I'm not. I'm implying that in my eyes it's hypocritical to complain about being indexed by Google with snippets while benefiting hugely from that [0]. Site owners can control what Google indexes and if a snippet shall be displayed [1]. To me it looks like news publishers failed to adapt their business models to the 21st century and now want to milk Google, even though Google brings them a lot of revenue in the form of visitors. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/5/7160587/german-publisher-axel-springer-google-news https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/5/7160587/german-publisher-... [1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/robots-exclusion-protocol.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/robots-exclusion-pro...
- srtjstjsj 6y agoSearch engine is intermediating and increasing competition. Without SEO competition for articles, we'd probably have fewer but more profitable news websites instead of thousands of sites praying each other's work (asymmetrically). It's a mixed bag.
- ricardo81 6y agoWell, I can't argue against what you're saying in your sub-comment here, Google is a for-profit service and provides traffic to other sites, and it's entirely optional via robots.txt whether people want to participate in being indexed. The problem enters with the insidious tracking that Google uses, that pushes their revenue per 1000 searches to way above any other search provider, alongside their monopoly position in many countries that allows them to be the default search choice in pretty much every major browser and device that's going to search for anything. Instead of being the agnostic middle-man as search used to be, Google is encroaching on publishers ability to be sustainable propositions, all the while taking their content. In the UK, Google has 95% of the search market, and 50% of content discovery is via search (sorry, no source at hand). Basically the choice of publishers is to cut off their arm while content aggregators suck the value from their unique content. It's not exactly an elevator pitch to prove the point, but there's countless parties that have elaborated along these lines. Surely there is room for a search engine purely to point you to other places on the web, is where I stand. Google serving news is just them providing a reason for you to load up google.com rather than any other place, which clearly they've massively succeeded in doing, being a portal rather than a middle man.
- katzgrau 6y agoSearch is really only the main driver of traffic for national sites. Local and niche coverage get traffic though a mix of social, newsletter subscribers, referrals, and direct visitors.
- senko 6y ago> Without Google those sites would lose the majority of their visitors That's not neccessarily true. Without a search engine, those sites would lose the majority of their visitors. But absent Google, another search engine would do the job. A search engine is a vital component in today's web. "Google search" is not, and its market power dominance doesn't give it a moral blank check.
- MaKey 6y agoThat's true. However, I fail to see moral wrongdoings by Google in the case of news publishers.
- liveoneggs 6y agomostly stealing their content in various ways and not compensating them for it
- kortilla 6y agoYou don’t see an issue with google scraping news contents out of the news articles and displaying a large snippet in the search results that eliminates 90% of the potential visitors?
- mrep 6y agoIf they don't want google to display a snippet, then they can "Use the nosnippet meta tag to prevent Google from displaying a snippet for your page in Search results, or use the max-snippet:[number] meta tag to specify the maximum length for your result snippets. You can also prevent certain parts of the page text content from being shown in a snippet by using data-nosnippet". [0] [0]: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en
- sildur 6y agoThat’s playing Google’s game. Where today you “simply” have to do X, which tomorrow will be X plus Y but not Z, and so on. What about Google don’t stealing content by default unless I add a meta tag named yes-google-steal-my-content?
- bananaface 6y agoWithout a feudal lord, peasants wouldn't have land to farm. News organisations aren't peasants but the issue is that the Lord is able to control & skim the majority of value from the resource (in this case, attention).
- dantheman 6y agoThey can choose the block google anytime they want; comparing them to lords and serfs is not a good comparison.
- bananaface 6y agoRight, and a serf can technically leave. But they can't, because they lose access to the pertinent resource. Where else can they farm? I don't like the media, I'm not trying to make out they're weak. My issue is that Google monopolising attention and then unilaterally taking news website's work for free is BS. They're skimming the vast majority of value from the industry with no kickbacks. They get away with it because no inidividual news organisation can fight. The only option is collective action (won't work, too much reward for defecting) or legislation.
- netcan 6y agoWithout Google, people would find different ways to reach news content.
- netcan 6y agoThe problem of "users expecting free" is a trope. It isn't the actual problem. You get advertising whether or not you pay for a channel. You even get ads at the cinema. You get spied on when you buy a phone, echo, when you use a paid app, subscribe to netflix, etc. It has nothing to do with free, in practice. This is just a way of pointing the finger at the public. "You are being abused because you are cheap and deserve to be". The "problem" is that advertising & espionage while creating market/portal/platform/feed monopolies is the most profitable strategy in most cases. A lot more profitable than selling stuff is. Just look at the largest fortunes made in recent times. A non-spyware messaging app would never be worth what FB paid for whatsapp, no matter how many paying users it had. Let's stop pretending that our moral failings and cheapskates are the problem. Newspapers have often had financial problems, and it has almost always been the case that "hard journalism" is not as profitable as entertainment media. Google are leveraging this to further cement their monopoly. They are the problem, not us. We are the victims.
- thechao 6y agoI want to argue that data gathering (in total) cannot be more valuable than selling stuff (in total), but I think that relies on a naive “pyramid” model of the economy. If I try to model this statement with actors (agents), I think it’s possible to build a set of mutually re-enforcing markets, where the value of data gathering for advertising is actually more valuable in aggregate than the “stuff” being advertised!
- Closi 6y agoAgreed, although the 'selling stuff' market is inevitably more fragmented than the 'data gathering' market, which means that the average 'data gathering' company will be more valuable than the average 'selling' company. That's not to say there aren't giants like Amazon trying to buck the trend...
- hrktb 6y agoAds are not just data gathering, but behavior nudging as well. Directing people on what to do could be more valuable than actually selling goods, in aggregate. In particular when their actions have long term ramifications (e.g. politics)
- joaomacp 6y agoIsn't PR the product news publishers provide? Edit: previous title was "Google is giving $1B to publishers. For PR, not a product."
- H8crilA 6y agoPretty much. Paul Graham's article on the topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- sdfhbdf 6y agoGoogle is in the advertising business not in Philantropy.
- lawrenceyan 6y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651284.
- spinningslate 6y agoGood article and generally agree with the sentiment. Google isn't doing this out of the goodness of its heart. As well as PR generally though, it's as much about owning the consumer. Google and Facebook are increasingly the portals through which the majority of people consume content online. Each wants to protect and grow that - it's central to their business model (and a well-understood strategy generally). The biggest threat to either is disintermediation. That would mean both less eyeballs and reduced ability to profile --> less effective hyper targeting --> reduced attractiveness to advertisers. In that context, $1bn is loose change for keeping the content providers as commodity suppliers behind the Google brand.
- kmetan 6y agoI believe that the goal here is also to break the existing unity among publishers.
- pearjuice 6y agoI truly don't understand publishers their negative attitude towards Google News. Everything combined, Google News is a net positive for publishers. They weren't as discoverable as they are now and probably see less traffic from any other source. They want to be compensated for being publicly indexed? Google should honestly just remove the complaining publishers from Google News or Google altogether. See how they like that. Let them opt-out if they dislike it that bad. It's like complaining to a phone book it lists phone numbers in an efficient manner.
- ganti_r 6y agoWhat will publishers do with troves of traffic. If the quality of the same is bad. The discoverablity is subjective. I as user a see the same sites and same topics thanks to "the algorithm". I don't mean to say publishers don't need Google. It is that now (compared to past) Google's position is much stronger and they dictate terms, publishers are screwed either ways, so better put a fight than now down
- sumtechguy 6y agoI think it is the heavy handed 'do it our way our way or we deplatform you' that publishers do not like. They are in a position where they can make or break someone with a couple of lines in a config file. They have also been playing favorites in their other algs. The content publishers know exactly what is up as they have the analytics to see the drop off when someone tweaks their position. Tossing a billion out there sounds like they want to keep some of their favorites going.
- buttersbrian 6y agoAnything google did to 'unearth' the underlying articles would probably be viewed this way. Are you arguing that not doing anything "news" specific, whether it be a focused search page or news "app", would be preferred? Can you elaborate on the "playing favorites"?
- RyJones 6y agoPaying the Danegeld, etc.
- OsmanBella 6y agoSomeone saw my comment online about wizardharry hacking skill's and how other people also write good about him and decide to contact wizardharry@programmer.net, she just informed me that Wizard Harry is indeed great.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoInteresting that it's $2B/3yr and not $.35B/1yr or $1.3B/4yr. That $1B is magic number.
- tgvaughan 6y agoAside: I think about this kind of thing a lot, and the answer is always "because humans have 10 digits on their hands". The world is strange.
- LatteLazy 6y agoThere's a whole mix of real issues here. Number one for me is that money won't buy quality and its quality we're sorely lacking on "journalism" today.
- BurningFrog 6y agoMoney buys quality in almost every other field. What makes journalism different?
- TuringNYC 6y agoSpot on. My news landscape today is far better than what existed 15 or 20yrs ago. There are new challenges, but also many new solutions. I particularly love things like Substack where journalists can be paid for good content w/o layers of middlemen.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoPrimary revenue source of journalism is exposure, which is easier to achieve by low quality, emotionally captivating, cookie-cutter garbage - so there's little incentive for changing the business model into one that would support "money buys quality". Related to that is that free-with-ads is essentially an alpha predator among business models; honest businesses can't compete with it - so it's doubly hard for a quality publisher to exit the equilibrium in which the whole industry sits.
- LatteLazy 6y agoIn most cases, money buys quality when the person paying cares and can tell. If you can't tell quality, money doesn't buy it (eg used cars for the average buyer). Also, if the person paying isn't the one using the product (or they don't care for some other reason), you stop getting quality (eg government cheese). Google arnt the ones reading articles so they don't suffer if quality falls. You also can't really quantify quality of journalism can you (of the million articles Google sponsors, which were good?). There are exceptions to this, the BBC for instance. But on the whole the US is very bad at this and even if it weren't, it's hard to do. This is also the reason journalism has collapsed in general: when customers paid for stories by buying papers the stories had to be good. But now advertisers are paying for clicks and any journalism that happens is purely co-incidental... There's also a big issue with censorship and control when Google literally own the news. I'm actually pretty pro Google, but given the amount of grilling they get, it would be really easy to just cancel some stories about them and push some about senators who dislike them etc.
- known 6y agoSomebody has to pay for the SOURCE of News; Those who are making money with news should pay first;
- mrep 6y agoSo who is making money on news then? A quick google search for "trump has coronavirus" shows some news articles and no advertisements whatsoever. Going to the news tab shows more articles and still no advertisements and I cannot recall ever seeing an ad when searching for news so it doesn't look like google is making money from their search engine on news to me.
- unilynx 6y agoGoogle search didn't start out with ads either. It's part of why we moved from Altavista et al to Google.. Google News is still in hot waters with various governments. It's too early to start monitizing it.
- philipkglass 6y agoGoogle News has been around since 2002 and I don't think it has ever shown ads.
- nathias 6y agoGoogle: don't don't be evil
- tynpeddler 6y agoI wonder if we would be having the same conversation if google had charged publishers to add them to the google news product. Even charging $5 a year seems like it could have completely turned this whole situation on its head. For one it would have offered publishers some contractual protections, but mainly it would have changed the publisher's mindset towards google. Now it's a provider of a service they need, and they do need it. The problem is that the internet made the "news" market way to efficient. Competition is incredibly fierce because the cost of distribution has plummeted, and because it turns out that most people don't read news for news, they read it for entertainment. If Google were to go away tomorrow, the publishers would be in the exact same position with Bing, DDG, Baidu, or whoever picks up the pieces. The economics have shifted, 90% of publishers are now offering a very low value product. If governments go out and create this artificial market to prop up the "news" they like, not only will it be prone to corruption (What counts as an eligible publisher? Does Google owe the Daily Sun and the BBC the same amount of money? If it's different, who decides by how much?), but in 30-50 years, we'll be talking about the news subsidies the same way we talk about farm subsidies today; a corrupt and wasteful relic from an era that refused to acknowledge things have changed. All that being said, the sales tax on digital adds is probably the best idea so far, but enforcement is going to be tricky.
- triceratops 6y agoNote: farm subsidies may well be corrupt and wasteful but they exist for national security reasons. A country that can't feed itself is completely vulnerable in times of conflict.
- scarmig 6y agoIt's implausible that we'd ever not be able to feed ourselves without farm subsidies. About half of our wheat is exported. Even if somehow we dropped more than 50% without farm subsidies, we have enough money that we could import from other countries; even if we faced a global ban on exporting food to the United States, it would not be difficult to begin using more land and labor to grow crops within the span of two years.
- praptak 6y agoCompanies reigning themselves in under threats of regulation might be better than actually whacking them with the regulation stick. Regulation has its costs too.
- IncRnd 6y agoThis is about Google keeping people on their site and forestalling regulatory fines. The only more aggressive behavior would be to create a non-profit company that distributes the money, then make all payments as donations to that company. Publishers may hardly ever see any money on an individual publisher basis.
- tsycho 6y agoWow! So much hate on this thread. And not a single reasonable proposal on what newspapers or Google can do to make things more equitable.
- bryan_w 6y agoHere's a reasonable proposal, they could get off their butts and actually innovate to adapt to a changing market. It's like they saw Netflix and iTunes and Spotify come up to adapt to the changing media markets and decided that they weren't affected for some magical reason. Now because they're going out of business, they're asking for handouts