4 ms·
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 ne
by 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.