8 ms·

I 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 symbiot

I 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 ago
Without Google those sites would lose the majority of their visitors, so what is the point you're trying to get across?
- ricardo81 6y ago
  Google 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 ago
    In 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 ago
    No, 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 ago
      Search 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 ago
      Well, 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 ago
  Search 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 ago
    That's true. However, I fail to see moral wrongdoings by Google in the case of news publishers.
    - liveoneggs 6y ago
      mostly stealing their content in various ways and not compensating them for it
    - kortilla 6y ago
      You 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 ago
        If 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 ago
        That’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 ago
  Without 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 ago
    They can choose the block google anytime they want; comparing them to lords and serfs is not a good comparison.
    - bananaface 6y ago
      Right, 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 ago
  Without Google, people would find different ways to reach news content.
netcan 6y ago
The 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Agreed, 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 ago
    Ads 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)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

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MaKey 6y ago

Without Google those sites would lose the majority of their visitors, so what is the point you're trying to get across?

ricardo81 6y ago
Google 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 ago
  In 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 ago
  No, 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 ago
    Search 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 ago
    Well, 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 ago
Search 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 ago
  That's true. However, I fail to see moral wrongdoings by Google in the case of news publishers.
  - liveoneggs 6y ago
    mostly stealing their content in various ways and not compensating them for it
  - kortilla 6y ago
    You 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 ago
      If 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 ago
        That’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 ago
Without 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 ago
  They can choose the block google anytime they want; comparing them to lords and serfs is not a good comparison.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    Right, 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 ago
Without Google, people would find different ways to reach news content.

netcan 6y ago

The 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Agreed, 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 ago
  Ads 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)