8 ms·

It’s a win-win already. Google is listing those sites giving them the opportunity to be seen by lots of people and news sites sell subscriptions or put ads on t

It’s a win-win already. Google is listing those sites giving them the opportunity to be seen by lots of people and news sites sell subscriptions or put ads on their sites to make money. I don’t really get why Google should pay news sites for promoting them and helping them make money. Personally, I always clicked to read more if I wanted to know more about a certain topic.

creata 6y ago
Yep. It feels like the news corporations are just being greedy, but I'd like to see their side of the case.
- the_other 6y ago
  Google and Facebook have been eating such a large proportion of the ad cake for years; of course news want a larger slice! Whether it's "fair" by the rules of capitalism that they get it is up to capitalism to decide, but it's definitely fair that they stake a claim.
  - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
    Ah the the massive advertising cash cow supported by journalists paid poverty wages. Before craigslist and property listing companies like right move, local newspapers had 30-40% margins (source a senior press officer I worked on a project with)
- m12k 6y ago
  I think the problem is that politicians know they should be regulating big tech, but doing so is hard. And then along comes a lobbyist from the news media with some draft legislation that's pretty easy to understand and pass. It doesn't actually solve any real problem, but it's _something_, and it allows them to be seen fighting against the bad guys that they're supposed to be fighting. Even though it means passing bad legislation
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  'News corporation' have been rendered pennyless since the decline of print, people dont want to pay for digital news. This has led to a global decline of standard sin journalism, they can't afford to send investigative journalists around the world, news stories are poorly researched and written. As a society we are paying a heavy price for this stupidity
  - vkou 6y ago
    My understanding is that news corporations have been rendered penniless by Craigslist eating their rather lucrative classifieds business.
    - vineyardmike 6y ago
      Both are true.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  Given that news organizations have been demolished over the last decade (in part due to a collapse of ad revenue), how much do you think it is reasonable for news organizations to charge for their content? If Google shouldn't be paying to take the content and redistribute it, who should? Personally I think there should be state funding for unbiased news so that neither the reader nor Google need to pay directly, but that's not where we are right now, all the important journalism is published by for-profit websites and it's behind paywalls. Given that, I don't think it should be surprising if a news site sees Google harvesting paragraphs from their articles and embedding them into results and goes 'hey, who said you could do that without paying for it?' Google Search infoboxes for a person or place or other topic typically are crammed full of information that Googlebot pulled from various parts of the internet. It's really useful to have that info! But if the websites that the info was sourced from rely on ad revenue, well, Google's spider didn't click on any ads. I don't think Google paying news sites for the privilege of indexing them is going to fix the revenue model for online news, but I also don't believe that the value of those news snippets is zero. As the article notes, their attempted solution was to switch to Headlines Only (which is what I get in the US right now), but the court objected since that was an obvious attempt to avoid paying by shipping an inferior product.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  Entitlement and very rich well connected owners
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Their side of the case is that they want money and they have the power to get it by influencing politicians and the public.
asar 6y ago
I'd argue that headlines and images are worth a lot, especially coming from actual journalist and photographers (not niche seo news sites). It is almost considered normal for companies scrape the web and combine different sources into personalized feeds for their own user bas, as Google does. But it's not normal, you could probably say it's stealing.
- qsort 6y ago
  It's definitely normal, and massively hypocritical on the news sites' part. If they didn't want their content to be indexed by search results, they could ask Google to remove it, but obviously they want to have their cake and eat it too. This is just "Europe trying to somehow regulate big tech chapter #N-plus-one", and while I do actually sympathize with the broader goal, news companies of all people complaining about Google don't deserve any compassion whatsoever.
  - anon98356 6y ago
    Why not? Google set itself up effectively as a gatekeeper to their content (whether by design or not that is the current situation) then completely gutted their primary revenue stream. Also, the major driver of this news is Google's attempts to get Australia to drop legislation. Australia is about as far away from Europe as you can get
    - qsort 6y ago
      > Google set itself up effectively as a gatekeeper to their content This isn't a fair characterization. They want their content to be indexed by Google, and furthermore most of those entities have separate distribution channels (television networks, print newspapers, etc.) that Google can't touch. Most people don't want to buy newspapers or watch news channels, but frankly they are absolutely correct, because 99% of that is freaking garbage no better than your average Facebook group. > Australia s/Europe/politicians-worldwide/g My point wasn't about Europe in particular (just observing that this kind of move, for better or for worse, is more popular in the EU). Again, I do agree that we should do something about Google & friends, but this piece of legislation is the classical politician's fallacy: we should do something, this is something, hence this is good.
new_here 6y ago
Exactly, with the current system Google is incentivised to prioritise the best content for users. If they now negotiate individual licensing agreements with each publisher this adds another factor (cost) to the ranking incentive. Also, where do you draw the line on what content Google should have to pay to index? What about independent bloggers for example? This policy could potentially open a whole new can of worms.
- mrtksn 6y ago
  How Google is incentivised to prioritise the best content for users? Google doesn't make anything if you quickly find what you are making for and consume it. Google's optimal position would be if you keep searching for the stuff you are looking for and get distracted by ads and buy something in the process. The second best thing would be if you find the stuff you are looking for directly on Google(Google no longer shows only search results but the content of the results as if it comes from them) and then you proceed to buy something through an ad click. For example, Google wins if you search for "When did Trump leave the White House" and you see a snipped containing "Trump left the WH in the early morning of January 20, 2021 using a helicopter". Now that you have your answer through the content that Google mined for free, they can monetize you but what about the people who put together that information? Why they would be left out of your business? What's fair about that? There was a recent HN discussion about Google mining the database of a small business that specialises on compiling information on the wealth of celebrities. They lost most of their traffic when Google began showing the answer from their database directly instead of showing the link that contains this information. Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24105465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24105465
  - new_here 6y ago
    If users feel they get the best results from Google then they continue to use Google which drives search and ad impressions. Ads are also clearly labelled so users can decide if they want to ignore sponsored results. I typically click the first result below ads or use an adblocker but that's just me. So this seems like a clear distinction between paid and organic results. I completely agree on the second point. Google's 'Featured Snippets' are a clear overreach where Google uses people's content at no cost and gives nothing in return. This needs to be regulated because nobody is going to opt-out. For example, I've had some featured snippets and they bring a lot of traffic. Much less than a normal first place listing but more than a second place listing. If I opt-out of Featured Snippets in protest then someone else will just happily take that spot. Perhaps the balance lies in just indexing headlines of sites. Then publishers could decide if they want to give up that information in their headlines. It's a tough to know where to draw the line but that seems like it's been the fairest balance so far.
piokoch 6y ago
And you nailed it perfectly "Personally, I always clicked to read more if I wanted to know more about a certain topic." The crux is that all those "information" sites want you to click even if you are totally not interested with the story. That's why you get all those titles like "prime minister was running around naked", so you think "what the heck is going on with our PM", and then it turns out it was prime minister of some obscure country and it happened 30 years ago. Today clicks matter, page overlay adds matter, subscription invitations matter, and so on. Google cuts significant number of those if you can see a snippet of the article and it is clear that there comes some cheap click-bait.
- hcurtiss 6y ago
  I guess I'm not terribly disappointed that Google may depriving them of that kind of revenue stream.
- lhorie 6y ago
  Doesn't it go both ways though? If there's a financial cost for Google to show links to articles, wouldn't it then be in Google's best interest to decrease the quantity of shallow articles that all more or less say the same thing with ever clickbaitier titles, in favor of showing fewer authoritative/comprehensive sources?
  - jkinudsjknds 6y ago
    Fewer articles shown is probably correct. But more clickbaity sounds more likely to me.
  - pb7 6y ago
    In before Google gets accused of manipulating search results to favor certain flavors of news publications over others.
    - lhorie 6y ago
      They already do that, though?
johnchristopher 6y ago
> "Google is listing those sites giving them the opportunity to be seen by lots of people [..]" Ah, yes. Just like when we don't want to pay people for their work. "But it will give you visibility and attract customers (for your free content anyway)".
- Retric 6y ago
  It’s a little different if the agreement is visibility and advertising revenue or your selling subscriptions. If news websites where unhappy about the deal they are free to use robots.txt and search engines will ignore them. So, clearly they receive some benefit and are simply arguing they should receive more.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    The problem is that the advertising revenue is also controlled by Google. Google plays both sides of the ad auction market while also controlling site visibility in the first place. In short, Google decides how many people sees your site and how much Google pays for those views. News sites have no power to negotiate without government intervention.
    - Retric 6y ago
      There are alternatives to Google for advertising revenue. No intermediary needed, newspapers used sell advertising directly.
      - 8note 6y ago
        They sure like buying up all the competition though.
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        And thus we arrive at the underlying problem. How about we address the root instead of the symptoms?
User23 6y ago
Because it’s the law is why. It is interesting though how completely unwilling the US government is to rein in big tech. The Europeans have no such reluctance and are well within their rights.
apple_innocent 6y ago
"I don't get why Google should pay news sites for promoting them and helping them make money." Because Google pays massive fees to be the "default search" on millions of computers. Why would they pay so much for that. They insert themselves between then computer user and the path to finding the media sources. Nerds may know how to get past middlemen if they need to, but most people using computers do not know how.

creata 6y ago

Yep. It feels like the news corporations are just being greedy, but I'd like to see their side of the case.

the_other 6y ago
Google and Facebook have been eating such a large proportion of the ad cake for years; of course news want a larger slice! Whether it's "fair" by the rules of capitalism that they get it is up to capitalism to decide, but it's definitely fair that they stake a claim.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  Ah the the massive advertising cash cow supported by journalists paid poverty wages. Before craigslist and property listing companies like right move, local newspapers had 30-40% margins (source a senior press officer I worked on a project with)
m12k 6y ago
I think the problem is that politicians know they should be regulating big tech, but doing so is hard. And then along comes a lobbyist from the news media with some draft legislation that's pretty easy to understand and pass. It doesn't actually solve any real problem, but it's _something_, and it allows them to be seen fighting against the bad guys that they're supposed to be fighting. Even though it means passing bad legislation
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
'News corporation' have been rendered pennyless since the decline of print, people dont want to pay for digital news. This has led to a global decline of standard sin journalism, they can't afford to send investigative journalists around the world, news stories are poorly researched and written. As a society we are paying a heavy price for this stupidity
- vkou 6y ago
  My understanding is that news corporations have been rendered penniless by Craigslist eating their rather lucrative classifieds business.
  - vineyardmike 6y ago
    Both are true.
kevingadd 6y ago
Given that news organizations have been demolished over the last decade (in part due to a collapse of ad revenue), how much do you think it is reasonable for news organizations to charge for their content? If Google shouldn't be paying to take the content and redistribute it, who should? Personally I think there should be state funding for unbiased news so that neither the reader nor Google need to pay directly, but that's not where we are right now, all the important journalism is published by for-profit websites and it's behind paywalls. Given that, I don't think it should be surprising if a news site sees Google harvesting paragraphs from their articles and embedding them into results and goes 'hey, who said you could do that without paying for it?' Google Search infoboxes for a person or place or other topic typically are crammed full of information that Googlebot pulled from various parts of the internet. It's really useful to have that info! But if the websites that the info was sourced from rely on ad revenue, well, Google's spider didn't click on any ads. I don't think Google paying news sites for the privilege of indexing them is going to fix the revenue model for online news, but I also don't believe that the value of those news snippets is zero. As the article notes, their attempted solution was to switch to Headlines Only (which is what I get in the US right now), but the court objected since that was an obvious attempt to avoid paying by shipping an inferior product.
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
Entitlement and very rich well connected owners
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
Their side of the case is that they want money and they have the power to get it by influencing politicians and the public.

asar 6y ago

I'd argue that headlines and images are worth a lot, especially coming from actual journalist and photographers (not niche seo news sites). It is almost considered normal for companies scrape the web and combine different sources into personalized feeds for their own user bas, as Google does. But it's not normal, you could probably say it's stealing.

qsort 6y ago
It's definitely normal, and massively hypocritical on the news sites' part. If they didn't want their content to be indexed by search results, they could ask Google to remove it, but obviously they want to have their cake and eat it too. This is just "Europe trying to somehow regulate big tech chapter #N-plus-one", and while I do actually sympathize with the broader goal, news companies of all people complaining about Google don't deserve any compassion whatsoever.
- anon98356 6y ago
  Why not? Google set itself up effectively as a gatekeeper to their content (whether by design or not that is the current situation) then completely gutted their primary revenue stream. Also, the major driver of this news is Google's attempts to get Australia to drop legislation. Australia is about as far away from Europe as you can get
  - qsort 6y ago
    > Google set itself up effectively as a gatekeeper to their content This isn't a fair characterization. They want their content to be indexed by Google, and furthermore most of those entities have separate distribution channels (television networks, print newspapers, etc.) that Google can't touch. Most people don't want to buy newspapers or watch news channels, but frankly they are absolutely correct, because 99% of that is freaking garbage no better than your average Facebook group. > Australia s/Europe/politicians-worldwide/g My point wasn't about Europe in particular (just observing that this kind of move, for better or for worse, is more popular in the EU). Again, I do agree that we should do something about Google & friends, but this piece of legislation is the classical politician's fallacy: we should do something, this is something, hence this is good.

new_here 6y ago

Exactly, with the current system Google is incentivised to prioritise the best content for users. If they now negotiate individual licensing agreements with each publisher this adds another factor (cost) to the ranking incentive. Also, where do you draw the line on what content Google should have to pay to index? What about independent bloggers for example? This policy could potentially open a whole new can of worms.

mrtksn 6y ago
How Google is incentivised to prioritise the best content for users? Google doesn't make anything if you quickly find what you are making for and consume it. Google's optimal position would be if you keep searching for the stuff you are looking for and get distracted by ads and buy something in the process. The second best thing would be if you find the stuff you are looking for directly on Google(Google no longer shows only search results but the content of the results as if it comes from them) and then you proceed to buy something through an ad click. For example, Google wins if you search for "When did Trump leave the White House" and you see a snipped containing "Trump left the WH in the early morning of January 20, 2021 using a helicopter". Now that you have your answer through the content that Google mined for free, they can monetize you but what about the people who put together that information? Why they would be left out of your business? What's fair about that? There was a recent HN discussion about Google mining the database of a small business that specialises on compiling information on the wealth of celebrities. They lost most of their traffic when Google began showing the answer from their database directly instead of showing the link that contains this information. Here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24105465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24105465
- new_here 6y ago
  If users feel they get the best results from Google then they continue to use Google which drives search and ad impressions. Ads are also clearly labelled so users can decide if they want to ignore sponsored results. I typically click the first result below ads or use an adblocker but that's just me. So this seems like a clear distinction between paid and organic results. I completely agree on the second point. Google's 'Featured Snippets' are a clear overreach where Google uses people's content at no cost and gives nothing in return. This needs to be regulated because nobody is going to opt-out. For example, I've had some featured snippets and they bring a lot of traffic. Much less than a normal first place listing but more than a second place listing. If I opt-out of Featured Snippets in protest then someone else will just happily take that spot. Perhaps the balance lies in just indexing headlines of sites. Then publishers could decide if they want to give up that information in their headlines. It's a tough to know where to draw the line but that seems like it's been the fairest balance so far.

piokoch 6y ago

And you nailed it perfectly "Personally, I always clicked to read more if I wanted to know more about a certain topic." The crux is that all those "information" sites want you to click even if you are totally not interested with the story. That's why you get all those titles like "prime minister was running around naked", so you think "what the heck is going on with our PM", and then it turns out it was prime minister of some obscure country and it happened 30 years ago. Today clicks matter, page overlay adds matter, subscription invitations matter, and so on. Google cuts significant number of those if you can see a snippet of the article and it is clear that there comes some cheap click-bait.

hcurtiss 6y ago
I guess I'm not terribly disappointed that Google may depriving them of that kind of revenue stream.
lhorie 6y ago
Doesn't it go both ways though? If there's a financial cost for Google to show links to articles, wouldn't it then be in Google's best interest to decrease the quantity of shallow articles that all more or less say the same thing with ever clickbaitier titles, in favor of showing fewer authoritative/comprehensive sources?
- jkinudsjknds 6y ago
  Fewer articles shown is probably correct. But more clickbaity sounds more likely to me.
- pb7 6y ago
  In before Google gets accused of manipulating search results to favor certain flavors of news publications over others.
  - lhorie 6y ago
    They already do that, though?

johnchristopher 6y ago

> "Google is listing those sites giving them the opportunity to be seen by lots of people [..]" Ah, yes. Just like when we don't want to pay people for their work. "But it will give you visibility and attract customers (for your free content anyway)".

Retric 6y ago
It’s a little different if the agreement is visibility and advertising revenue or your selling subscriptions. If news websites where unhappy about the deal they are free to use robots.txt and search engines will ignore them. So, clearly they receive some benefit and are simply arguing they should receive more.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  The problem is that the advertising revenue is also controlled by Google. Google plays both sides of the ad auction market while also controlling site visibility in the first place. In short, Google decides how many people sees your site and how much Google pays for those views. News sites have no power to negotiate without government intervention.
  - Retric 6y ago
    There are alternatives to Google for advertising revenue. No intermediary needed, newspapers used sell advertising directly.
    - 8note 6y ago
      They sure like buying up all the competition though.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        And thus we arrive at the underlying problem. How about we address the root instead of the symptoms?

User23 6y ago

Because it’s the law is why. It is interesting though how completely unwilling the US government is to rein in big tech. The Europeans have no such reluctance and are well within their rights.

apple_innocent 6y ago

"I don't get why Google should pay news sites for promoting them and helping them make money." Because Google pays massive fees to be the "default search" on millions of computers. Why would they pay so much for that. They insert themselves between then computer user and the path to finding the media sources. Nerds may know how to get past middlemen if they need to, but most people using computers do not know how.