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.'"
robots.txt?
Or are they trying to get paid rather than make a point?
If the benefit is so "heavily skewed" then it should be a no-brainer to ask Google not to index your news site.
...as much money. Please, government, bail us out of this mess we're in! Our shareholders profits are at near-record lows!
The same issues are facing all news organizations, except for the few that actually embraced technology, or started pay for content long before news aggregates became en vogue.
Sent from your iPad.
Then google will play fair, im sure these news agencies will miss being able to use google's services for free when researching...
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
I just visited Google News two minutes ago, and clicking on the stories there takes you to the newspaper/media outlet's page, not some ad laden screenscraped Google version.
All these people who think that the Internet should change because it doesn't fit in with their flawed idea of how things should work need to grow up or GTFO.
claiming they reap the benefit of content from news sites without contributing anything towards their costs
Well, go ahead, be the first brave news source to ask Google to remove you from their caches. It'd be suicide. Even the article points out what you'd be doing:
The Guardian says content providers are faced with a catch-22: they can't afford to withhold content from search engines, yet can't feasibly charge consumers for it either, "not least because of the presence of the BBC and the vast quantities of free content it publishes on bbc.co.uk."
I'd like to hear and discuss the alternatives mentioned in the summary but can't find them in the article.
Has the Guardian's online readership or ad revenue plummeted?
Perhaps you should just learn to deal with Google acting as a portal and give your readers a reason to visit your site to read the whole article? This is overall a good thing for you--don't ruin it.
Where is Google making the money and how could you scale fractions of that to go out to sites based on popularity?
My work here is dung.
You'll notice when you load news.google.com - not a single ad. Click on ANY of the links... ads.
Now then, who is making money from this relationship?
Not only that, but there is a technical solution: check the referrer and if it is news.google.com throw the user to your home page so that you can pretend to "control" them. Or block them and let your competitors get the ad revenue.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The INTERNET, and the Web on it...were never created with the purpose of generating revenue for companies. You guys jumped on late in the game, and while you're welcome to use it for said purposes, it is not tailored to those purposes. If you don't like 'sharing' via the web, don't put it out there for anybody to see for free. It is public domain (or should be) at that point.
If you don't want people or groups or other sites to access your freely publicized data....don't put it out there where anyone can get it. Either keep it off the web or put it behind a 'wall' where only paying members can see it.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If the New York Times or your local paper are going out of busienss because you and I are finding our news on Google News then either we should pay or Google should pay.
I'd agree, except that Google does not actually produce news, or even reprint other people's articles. "Finding our news on Google News" means that we are being directed to the New York Times or your local paper. Those papers BENEFIT from Google's links.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
Because we, unlike our moron competitors, understand that these clips bring traffic to our site, which makes us money.
If you're a small site, that might be a fair argument, and presumably nothing would stop you from voluntarily sharing your content with Google.
On the other hand, given your claim to work for a particularly large paper, I have to be a bit sceptical. I happen to use the BBC News web site as my first news source of choice, and I don't need Google to tell me how to find them every day.
That being the case, I find it hard to believe that high-profile, high-traffic sites like the Beeb really get more benefit from occasional search hits via Google than a news aggregator would get from scraping all of the headlines from the originating site, and I find Google's argument here to be wishful thinking rather than based on any real merit.
Alas, I predict with some confidence that this Slashdot discussion will be full of people who think GMG are just upset about losing revenue, while paying no attention to ideas such as giving credit where its due and supporting the people who actually do the legwork to research news stories. I wonder if such people would rather live in a world where good quality, original news sources are only available to subscribers, and the aggregators are reduced to the level of Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and the like.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I know, I don't understand their complaint at all. Google is driving traffic to their sites. How is that a bad thing?
How is Google making money on the news aggregation? I don't see any ads here:
http://news.google.com/
So presumably they are making money on search advertising:
http://news.google.com/news?q=profit
How terrible of them to provide a service whereby people can search the news and then click to read the original stories (and they give a reasonable amount of credit right there on the search page...).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The big problem with your argument is: once you throw a reasonable answer at the problem it's no longer news-worthy. It's so easy to keep a search engine off your site the article would quickly become a technical how-to... and uninteresting to the non-slashdot masses.
If you don't want to share then take your ball and go home. Google thugs aren't shaking-down editors, nor in the case of common feeds like the AP are taking anything beyond what they are allowed to. Close your doors, create a consortium-only system for sharing across "approved" sites, and you're good to go. The perceived money you're losing from not doing this already would easily cover the costs of developing and maintaining the system.
Just hope enough people are willing to come over and only play with your ball that it pays the bills. I would have never found places like the Guardian without Google, and if they remove their content would never go back.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
If you don't want people or groups or other sites to access your freely publicized data....don't put it out there where anyone can get it. Either keep it off the web or put it behind a 'wall' where only paying members can see it.
Paywalls don't work well, so why do that when they can coerce a revenue stream with lawsuits and/or petitions?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Who makes more money? The travel agent, or the vacation resorts? They travel agent NEEDS the resorts or they would have nothing to sell, but the resort is depended on the agent for their trade. If they are ignored by the travel agent, they don't do business as they are to small to attract their own customers.
Same with hotels and hotel booking agencies. Who controls who?
With google and the guardian it is pretty clear. Google is a multi-billion dollar company operating around the globe. The guardian a small british newspaper. This is in a way odd. It would be like the hotel booking agency being ten times the size of the hotels it refers to.
Because that is what google does. It indexes the newssites for us visitors and then allows us to choose the ones we want to visit. For that service it charges a fee in the form of advertising. The amazing thing is that Google has managed to make billions out of this. They are the portal that works! What is even weirder is that the end destinations of us visitors don't seem to be able to make enough money.
Imagine a travel agent that worked for free printing only a cheap add on your ticket, yet earned more money then the resorts themselves.
Historically, these type of refferal agencies have always had an uneasy relationship with their end-users. Travel companies have long since tried to get independent of travel agencies, selling their own products or forming alliances to operate their own.
Hotels love to have customers referred to them, but they hate that booking agencies can send potential customers to better/cheaper accomodations. Price compare sites are fought thought and nail by retailers. Hell, tv companies hate cable companies and expect them to pay for giving them the viewers that view their ads.
Google is making money thanks to others people content. This doesn't sit well, espeically when the people making the content have trouble making money themselves.
There is no easy solution. No content, no google. If news.google.com can't link to stories anymore, nobody would use it. Converserly, without news.google.com I wouldn;t vist half the news sites I do now.
Frankly both need to figure this out together as they need to realise they need each other. After all the guardian has an obvious solution, block google, but they don't want that. They just don't want the referrer to keep all they money for themselves. Google on the other hand has every right to say "though shit". They refer viewers to news sites. That the newssites can't make money of this ain't their problem. What next? A cabbie got to pay a portion of their fee to the hotel they drive people too? On the other hand, that cabbie as google NEEDS these end destinations.
But seeing the struggle in other industries makes it clear that this problem won't be solved.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Besides, if you really wanted to block them, wouldn't one just block the Googlebot? Or nofollow the entire site? Or robots.txt the entire site?
What they really want is to be in the top of the search results without having to have the stuff out there. You can't have it both ways.
Random Musings
Nor would the only rational alternative. They don't like google, they can block google. They don't have to ask government to intervene in an area it has neither knowledge, skill nor particular legitimacy.
There's an argument to be made that they are, indirectly, profiting through the strengthened brand they are creating by increasing traffic to a Google branded website but it is a weak argument. Of course, the whole premise is weak. Companies have been taking advantage of the things their competitors leave in the public domain, virtually, forever. Think about all the little businesses that use the location of stores like Wal-Mart, McDonalds, etc. to pick locations. They're taking advantage of all the work done by employees of those, larger, companies to pick locations with high profit potential due to things like high traffic, good visibility, etc.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
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 suspect that 100 years from now, the businesses that are bemoaning the freedom that the Internet provides will be footnotes in our grand children's history books; whereas the advent of the Internet will be regarded as on par with irrigation, the plow, and the printing press.
It's hard for me to even get pissed off at the music, movie, and news agencies anymore; in a way, I feel sorry for them. They lack the imagination and creativity necessary to change in the face of massive technological upheaval. In 20 years they will either have changed so much as to be unrecognizable or someone will have risen up to take their place. Hand copiers of books lasted decades after Gutenberg's press was introduced, but their demise was just as inevitable.
1.) Newspaper asks Google to pay for clips.
2.) Google drops newspaper from news index.
3.) Newspaper calculates the difference this makes in their revenue.
5.) Newspaper offers to pay Google rather a lot in order to be re-indexed.
Problem solved.
http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=93977&topic=11673
It's not like they're hiding the information or masquerading as normal computers. They have clear instructions on how to disable if you don't like it.
Dilbert RSS feed
There's the key. It is insanely trivial to get google to not index something. If they really weren't happy with what google was doing, they could just say "google, don't do that anymore", and google wouldn't do that anymore. (If I were google, I'd just respond by no longer indexing them, until they specifically request it.)
This is clearly just a try for a quick easy payoff.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I don't think that's it. Google has worked out with a deal with the AP which allows them to carry that news directly. This deal undoubtedly involved google giving money to the AP. If the newspapers are unhappy that their particular rehashing of an AP article doesn't make the top of the list, they can cry me a river. If the newspapers aren't happy with the deal they're getting from the AP they should end that relationship.
If a newspaper does it's own reporting google still links directly to the newspaper. No one knows exactly how googles ranking algorithm works, but suffice to say if you write the most popular article about a particular news story, you're going to be at or near the top of the list. There is a bit of a self reinforcing cycle here because as soon as google lists you at the top, you're going to become plenty more popular, but in theory as a story is breaking the news sources should be more or less on equal footing.
All that said, I'd like to add that while plenty of people are giddy about the death of old media, I'm a not nearly so sanguine. I'm worried about the future of investigative journalism, and I've got to think that for every investigative journalist that huffpo hires, 10 are laid off from the rocky mountain news. Blogging has done a lot to give stories perspective, but there's a value in having full time reporters that i don't self-publishing freelancers are likely to equal. I hope whatever the ultimate outcome is, it involves dispersed funding, and that the more newspapers don't become vanity presses like the Washington Times and the New York Post.
Paywalls don't work well
Well, as the parent said, the Internet is not now and never was setup as a means of revenue generation.
so why do that when they can coerce a revenue stream with lawsuits and/or petitions?
It's up to to companies seeking to profit from the Internet to figure out how to use the Internet as it exists to make money. It's not up the rest of the Internet to contort itself to somehow produce a revenue stream for a given company or industry.
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There were. Specifically, the Church was. The Gutenberg Bible was famous for taking sole possession of the Bible out of the hands of the Church and making it available in mass quantities to the masses.
There's plenty of creativity. The masses just don't want to pay. There's no business model to compensate for that, so the only choice is to go out of business. Unfortunately this will hinder a lot of actually creative people in the process who would, you know, like to continue eating.
How did you get modded up for not reading the parent's comment?
This is Slashdot. The next logical step after not reading the article on which you are commenting is not reading the comment to which you reply. :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Unfortunately...the businesses have the politicians/lawmakers in their pocket. Actually, it is a testament to how WELL the internet and its protocols, and design with no ONE person in charge, that so far, as much as they've tried and keep trying, that it has not all yet been locked down, with no anonymity, for revenue generation ONLY.
At least for now...anyone out of John Q.Public, can hook up a computer to it, and become a peer to any other computer out there.
Frankly, I think it has to just "kill" those in charge that they got in late on the party, and cannot better control this medium and regulate it into uselessness for the masses.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
>>>>>Paywalls don't work well
>>Well, as the parent said, the Internet is not now and never was setup as a means of revenue generation.
Playboy.com seems to be making-out okay. They provide some stuff for free but 99% of the material is locked behind a paywall, and they are earning quite a bit of cash. There a couple other sites successfully generating revenue via website subscription too.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
How about Google drops these whiny little bitches from their news service and let the news outlets explain to their advertising clients why they're suddenly getting a fraction of the page hits they were once getting.
On a similar vein, I think the reason we're not seeing the answers right now are partly because of an over-valuation of the old forms of media advertising.
Imagine a world where instead of going to thepiratebay, you could - for the price of a login and supplying some demographic information - legally download your favourite shows. Imagine if these files had one minute of targeted advertising embedded at the start - short enough that most times you might not even bother fast-forwarding through it.
Such adverts could represent higher-value for advertisers, reducing the need for the "1/3rds adverts to every 2/3rds of content" shotgun approach we currently are subjected to.
The only things standing in the way of this are the existing networks and cable companies who parasitically feed off the entertainment production industry and add nothing but an initial funding capital, the requirement of which has been propagated by the imperfect flow of information which the internet corrects -- an infrastructure like YouTube could sell $1 shares in the next Joss Whedon project, or "pets wearing hats" channel, and everyone would be happy.
But until new media asserts its muscle with regards the value it can provide advertisers, and wrestles control away from our bloated old-media, we'll be stuck in this limbo of litigation and thinking the alternative is limited to "Ask a Ninja".
You may ask, why wouldn't people still go to thepiratebay and get advertless-clips, thus destroying the model? They certainly will if they are paranoid about giving out any information, if they do not have the option to fast-forward through ads, or if the ads themselves are too long or not targeted. But for most folks, ease-of-use of a single-source, and guaranteed quality would be strong retention factors I think.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
- Robert Heinlein, Life Line, 1939
Not intended to be any kind of argument or assertion, but it seemed appropriate given your post, and I like it, especially considering that it's 70 years old and is so relevant today.