6 ms·

Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I

by grf27 3y ago

Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? There's a similar issues with some news sites basically copying or rephrasing the content of a newspaper story. I've seen news stories by third-parties, where the story lists their source as "The New York Times" It's tough to figure out a way to compensate the people who create the news, and the people who disseminate the news.

foogazi 3y ago
> And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? Don’t those news sources have ads too ? How are they making income from local views?
- babypuncher 3y ago
  Because very few people click through to the article, they just read the headline, summary, and comments on Facebook. Facebook is capturing most of the economic value generated by these articles.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Reminds me of hackernews. I'm doing it now (commenting) without visiting the site because I'm aware of the story.
  - Marsymars 3y ago
    Eh, I’d content that most of the economic value is captured by users reading the articles. The comments and ads are near-zero-sum in the aggregate, if that.
  - xdennis 3y ago
    That happens with everything. People talk about movies without having seen them, discuss what woodworking tools are best with no intent to buy them, and the relative value of random sports cars without ever being able to afford them. If newspapers would be able to charge people for referencing an article, then why shouldn't Lamborghini be able to charge people who talk about the Aventador?
    - babypuncher 3y ago
      The difference is that most of the value of a movie doesn't come from the title and a synopsis of the prologue. You need to actually watch most movies through to completion in order to speak about them with any competency. In journalism, articles are generally written following an "inverted pyramid" pattern. The most critical information is put at the top (the headline, and the first paragraph). As you move further down, the information becomes less and less critical to the overall story. The idea being that most people only want the broad strokes (X candidate won an election, Y submarine went missing in the Atlantic). It is harmful to the news orgs because people used to have to buy their newspaper or magazine, or see ads on their website or TV channel, in order to get any of this information. Now people get 90% of the relevant information from their social media feed, where Facebook or Reddit or whoever rakes in all the ad revenue. I'm not endorsing Canada's solution to this problem, but I don't think it is very helpful to pretend this isn't a problem at all. Good journalism is expensive, and the fact that nobody is willing to pay for it is why it seems like a lot of the news that is left is either clickbait or propped up by corporate or political interests. We need some way to continue funding quality independent journalism or it will cease to exist in a sea of clickbait and AI-generated nonsense.
- grf27 3y ago
  Yes they do. But the income from one story doesn't pay the cost to generate all the other stories that the paper produces. According to our local paper that just shut down, their ads couldn't compete with the ads on Google/Facebook. So the only profitable stories are very narrow, or the click-bait type that might be picked up by Facebook, assuming that Facebook doesn't just extract and show the core of the story. This isn't a new problem. A friend of mine used to do articles on historical issues and post them on his blog. They were good enough that there were other sites that would just copy them and change the byline to themselves. Grounds for a lawsuit, but the cost of the lawsuit and the tiny amount of damages made it impractical. Now he does the articles but tries to sell them to publishers. His income from that is now so tiny that it's no longer cost effective. Local papers now are money-losers, and the centralization of those many papers in the hands of a few corporations seems more to provide political influence than make money from news. In our recent election, the 160 papers owned by one corporation all made the same political endorsements. Australia's moves to charge for local news was a first, I think, and at the time there was comment that it could be the wave of the future. Google/Facebook have financial incentive to try to head off the same action in other countries.
PulpNonfiction 3y ago
[dead]
halifaxbeard 3y ago
My understanding of the core issue is people aren’t clicking through to read the article, but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline. Facebook gets ad views and user-generated content/comments, and the organization doing the reporting sees nothing of the economic value generated in this scenario. (Hacker News is specialized in audience and news orgs generally aren’t posting all their stories here) CBC tried to head this problem off by disabling comments on all their Facebook posts so people would comment on CBC.ca.
- wvenable 3y ago
  My issue with this, is this a problem that needs to be solved? Do we need to guarantee monetization of every human interaction? If my friend and I go a cafe, see a newspaper headline, and have a discussion about that headline without ever opening that newspaper should the cafe have to pay for that discussion? Why should any media adjacent interaction anywhere happen without payment? If the cafe is playing music, they're paying licence fees for that. Why not everything?
  - doublebind 3y ago
    I believe the problem is that the situation you describe occurs on a much bigger scale. It’s no longer you and your friend in the cafe; it’s millions of people looking at the headline on the screen.
    - wvenable 3y ago
      The scale has always existed. Thousands of cafes filled with millions of people. Even on Facebook, if I comment on a headline it's still just me making that comment. I, singular, provide some value to Facebook by being there and no value to newspaper because I didn't click though. If Facebook didn't exist, the value I bring to the newspaper by not reading it is the same.
  - arrosenberg 3y ago
    In your example the cafe isn't monetizing the fact that you view the headline and comment, which inherently increases the advertising value of the cafe (i.e. more people won't come to the cafe because of the headlines and their need to comment on it) and which captures significantly more value than everyone else involved. You just read the headline, a few people buy the paper and everyone is equitable and happy. If Meta wants to pay 100% tax on their ad revenues to fund journalism, all they have to do is say so.
rossjudson 3y ago
If you'd like to understand what Google is actually doing with the news, it's outlined here. https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/CHPC/Brief/BR12044085/br-external/GoogleCanada-e.pdf https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/CHPC/Brief/B... And Jeff Elgie provides an informed view: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/village-medias-c-18-update-jeff-elgie/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/village-medias-c-18-update-je...
darkclouds 3y ago
> I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. How do you think University's and teachers feel? They teach millions of people who later go on to make lots of money off the efforts of the educational establishment and educator, although in this case I seem to remember Zuck dropped out. Perhaps Govt taught him, if you are big enough, you can do wtf you like, so maybe he's a modern day Robin Hood like figure? Robbing from the rich to give to the poor?
jsnell 3y ago
> Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? No. The law would apply even if Google and Facebook showed no ads on a same page as a link to a news article, and made no money from them. (And in fact, e.g. Google News does not show any ads.) > Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? Not really, no. Australia passed a law but didn't actually make it apply to anyone. (Yes, seriously, the law is defined to apply to a set of companies that the government designates at their whim, and they've so far not designated any companies). The deals that Google/Meta made with Australian news companies are the same kinds of deals they've made in countries all over the world without such a law, including Canada. Those Australian deals will reportedly terminate if Google/Meta are designated as being in scope of the law, so now any news company with a deal has an incentive to argue against their designation while a company without a deal will argue for. In a similar vein, the deals in Canada are apparently going to be terminated due to this law.

by grf27 3y ago

foogazi 3y ago

> And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income? Don’t those news sources have ads too ? How are they making income from local views?

babypuncher 3y ago
Because very few people click through to the article, they just read the headline, summary, and comments on Facebook. Facebook is capturing most of the economic value generated by these articles.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Reminds me of hackernews. I'm doing it now (commenting) without visiting the site because I'm aware of the story.
- Marsymars 3y ago
  Eh, I’d content that most of the economic value is captured by users reading the articles. The comments and ads are near-zero-sum in the aggregate, if that.
- xdennis 3y ago
  That happens with everything. People talk about movies without having seen them, discuss what woodworking tools are best with no intent to buy them, and the relative value of random sports cars without ever being able to afford them. If newspapers would be able to charge people for referencing an article, then why shouldn't Lamborghini be able to charge people who talk about the Aventador?
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    The difference is that most of the value of a movie doesn't come from the title and a synopsis of the prologue. You need to actually watch most movies through to completion in order to speak about them with any competency. In journalism, articles are generally written following an "inverted pyramid" pattern. The most critical information is put at the top (the headline, and the first paragraph). As you move further down, the information becomes less and less critical to the overall story. The idea being that most people only want the broad strokes (X candidate won an election, Y submarine went missing in the Atlantic). It is harmful to the news orgs because people used to have to buy their newspaper or magazine, or see ads on their website or TV channel, in order to get any of this information. Now people get 90% of the relevant information from their social media feed, where Facebook or Reddit or whoever rakes in all the ad revenue. I'm not endorsing Canada's solution to this problem, but I don't think it is very helpful to pretend this isn't a problem at all. Good journalism is expensive, and the fact that nobody is willing to pay for it is why it seems like a lot of the news that is left is either clickbait or propped up by corporate or political interests. We need some way to continue funding quality independent journalism or it will cease to exist in a sea of clickbait and AI-generated nonsense.
grf27 3y ago
Yes they do. But the income from one story doesn't pay the cost to generate all the other stories that the paper produces. According to our local paper that just shut down, their ads couldn't compete with the ads on Google/Facebook. So the only profitable stories are very narrow, or the click-bait type that might be picked up by Facebook, assuming that Facebook doesn't just extract and show the core of the story. This isn't a new problem. A friend of mine used to do articles on historical issues and post them on his blog. They were good enough that there were other sites that would just copy them and change the byline to themselves. Grounds for a lawsuit, but the cost of the lawsuit and the tiny amount of damages made it impractical. Now he does the articles but tries to sell them to publishers. His income from that is now so tiny that it's no longer cost effective. Local papers now are money-losers, and the centralization of those many papers in the hands of a few corporations seems more to provide political influence than make money from news. In our recent election, the 160 papers owned by one corporation all made the same political endorsements. Australia's moves to charge for local news was a first, I think, and at the time there was comment that it could be the wave of the future. Google/Facebook have financial incentive to try to head off the same action in other countries.

PulpNonfiction 3y ago

[dead]

halifaxbeard 3y ago

My understanding of the core issue is people aren’t clicking through to read the article, but they’re commenting on Facebook based on the headline. Facebook gets ad views and user-generated content/comments, and the organization doing the reporting sees nothing of the economic value generated in this scenario. (Hacker News is specialized in audience and news orgs generally aren’t posting all their stories here) CBC tried to head this problem off by disabling comments on all their Facebook posts so people would comment on CBC.ca.

wvenable 3y ago
My issue with this, is this a problem that needs to be solved? Do we need to guarantee monetization of every human interaction? If my friend and I go a cafe, see a newspaper headline, and have a discussion about that headline without ever opening that newspaper should the cafe have to pay for that discussion? Why should any media adjacent interaction anywhere happen without payment? If the cafe is playing music, they're paying licence fees for that. Why not everything?
- doublebind 3y ago
  I believe the problem is that the situation you describe occurs on a much bigger scale. It’s no longer you and your friend in the cafe; it’s millions of people looking at the headline on the screen.
  - wvenable 3y ago
    The scale has always existed. Thousands of cafes filled with millions of people. Even on Facebook, if I comment on a headline it's still just me making that comment. I, singular, provide some value to Facebook by being there and no value to newspaper because I didn't click though. If Facebook didn't exist, the value I bring to the newspaper by not reading it is the same.
- arrosenberg 3y ago
  In your example the cafe isn't monetizing the fact that you view the headline and comment, which inherently increases the advertising value of the cafe (i.e. more people won't come to the cafe because of the headlines and their need to comment on it) and which captures significantly more value than everyone else involved. You just read the headline, a few people buy the paper and everyone is equitable and happy. If Meta wants to pay 100% tax on their ad revenues to fund journalism, all they have to do is say so.

rossjudson 3y ago

If you'd like to understand what Google is actually doing with the news, it's outlined here. https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/CHPC/Brief/BR12044085/br-external/GoogleCanada-e.pdf https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/CHPC/Brief/B... And Jeff Elgie provides an informed view: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/village-medias-c-18-update-jeff-elgie/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/village-medias-c-18-update-je...

darkclouds 3y ago

> I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story. How do you think University's and teachers feel? They teach millions of people who later go on to make lots of money off the efforts of the educational establishment and educator, although in this case I seem to remember Zuck dropped out. Perhaps Govt taught him, if you are big enough, you can do wtf you like, so maybe he's a modern day Robin Hood like figure? Robbing from the rich to give to the poor?

jsnell 3y ago

> Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? No. The law would apply even if Google and Facebook showed no ads on a same page as a link to a news article, and made no money from them. (And in fact, e.g. Google News does not show any ads.) > Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something? Not really, no. Australia passed a law but didn't actually make it apply to anyone. (Yes, seriously, the law is defined to apply to a set of companies that the government designates at their whim, and they've so far not designated any companies). The deals that Google/Meta made with Australian news companies are the same kinds of deals they've made in countries all over the world without such a law, including Canada. Those Australian deals will reportedly terminate if Google/Meta are designated as being in scope of the law, so now any news company with a deal has an incentive to argue against their designation while a company without a deal will argue for. In a similar vein, the deals in Canada are apparently going to be terminated due to this law.