Slashdot Mirror
Should Google Be Forced To Pay For News?
Barence writes "The Guardian Media group is asking the British government to investigate Google News and other aggregators, claiming they reap the benefit of content from news sites without contributing anything towards their costs. The Guardian claims the old argument that 'search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content' doesn't hold water any more, and that it's 'heavily skewed' in Google's favour. It wants the government to explore new models that 'require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site (through advertising) and "at the edges" in the world of search and aggregation.'"
The funny thing is that I've had the Guardian on my RSS feed for a while, mainly because their RSS feed contains the whole article, so I don't even need to click the link unless I want to see pictures.
My feed reader might be "stealing" from them, but they seem to be encouraging it.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
You're assuming that most people look for news on Google by doing to http://news.google.com/. Most people go directly to www.google.com and search. For example, I'm looking for news about the death of extreme skier Shane McConkey so I do this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Shane+McConkey&aq=f&oq= At the top of that page is a news link (with ads to the right). When I click on the news link I'm taken here: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=Shane+McConkey&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=pUfSSarBE52ctgOA8PjHAw&sa=X&oi=news_result&resnum=1&ct=title That's a Google News page with a summary of a wide range of news topics on Shane McConkey...including ads to the right. Hence, Google is monetizing news content that they don't pay for.
I work for the news wire AFP, and we have an agreement with Google to use our news.. and they DO pay us... http://searchengineland.com/afp-google-settle-over-google-news-copyright-case-10926
Actually, I had to REQUEST being added as a Google News source. A little while later we were reviewed and they determined that we were a news source and not just a link spammer, and voila, we were listed.
Being added and/or removed isn't a big deal. The link is at the bottom of the main Google News page.
The first time we were listed on the front page (at the top of the page at that), we were killed. Slashdotted to an extreme, if you will. A bit of improving, and now we don't notice when we're shown on the main page. Sometimes we're on the direct news.google.com page. Sometimes we're on a section, or a national page.
Stories that are linked from the main page frequently get us higher traffic, but not always. Well, there will always be more hits, but it may not outrank other stories that we've historically run. In any case, any publisher that has advertising, that counts their views and clicks (like, ummm, anyone with a clue should be doing for years now), their income will increase from being linked, IF they have a quality story.
I think they want to charge, because there's pretty serious competition. Just because my story is linked directly from the main page doesn't mean that it'll be there in an hour or tomorrow. It can (and frequently does) rotate the links to the more current story. So, I ran my story at noon. You ran yours at 2pm with updates, yours is more relevant.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
It kind of makes me wonder if there were groups of professional copiers who were pissed off 500 years ago when Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe.
I don't know about that invention, but the invention of music notation pissed off the existing music-teaching cartel and resulted in retribution against its inventor!
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
The parent is correct. While the Pope may have bought into printing for his own purposes, the Church objected mightily to the translations that were printed in the common language. William Tynedale was even executed for his work in translating the Bible into English.