Forget Facebook, I won’t defend it. But I don’t see how google removes revenue from news agencies. They are free to put up pay walls and get deindexed. Or do t

Forget Facebook, I won’t defend it. But I don’t see how google removes revenue from news agencies. They are free to put up pay walls and get deindexed. Or do the hybrid paywall thing that nyt and wsj does where they show up in the searches but people have to login/pay. The problem is newspapers haven’t figured out how to make people pay online. This isn’t a google problem. It might be a Facebook opportunity/problem though. From my perspective as a news consumer, the modern newspapers online are too expensive by far. I have a wsj article I want to read. But I’d have to buy a (no doubt hard to cancel) subscription to view it. Ditto the economist - they’re the worst I had a sub and I didn’t want to call them and deal with their hard sell desubscribe, so I had my credit card block them. If this was the real world, and I saw that interesting wsj article, I’d fork over my $0.25 or $0.50 or whatever for the issue and walk away with it. Rather than entering a lifetime data relationship with some entity that wants to exploit me for more money. That’s why people don’t pay for news: you can’t on a casual basis.