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.'"

Comments

Not us.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the online division of a particularly large paper.

We work hand-in-hand with google and push to get as much content on there for free as possible.

Because we, unlike our moron competitors, understand that these clips bring traffic to our site, which makes us money.

Re:Not us.

[clang_jangle]

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.

I'm sure the big papers would rather have more readers like you. The real issue here is that google news is a sort of great equalizer, giving equal exposure and opportunity to many news sources large and small. It isn't that google is stealing their business, it's just helping to make many news sources available that people might not notice otherwise. And that's exactly what I like about it.

Re:Not us.

[plague3106]

Well, except that here in the US radio stations are allowed to play music royalty free. The arguement is that the stations are basically advertising the songs played by playing them. The US Supreme Court agreed.

What baffles me is that online radio used the same argument and lost. Hmm.

Re:Not us.

[okooolo]

disclaimer: I'm not an IT guy. What if a newspaper doesn't want to be indexed by Google news, but still wants to be searchable by people using Google search? would robots.txt accommodate that?

Re:Not us.

[RDW]

'They don't have to ask government to intervene in an area it has neither knowledge, skill nor particular legitimacy.'

The full response, which you can read here:

http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/GMG_DBIRResponse.pdf

is as much a swipe at the BBC as at Google, etc. The 'BBC Trust', installed by the current government a couple of years ago to oversee the Beeb's activities, has shown a worrying tendency to bend over backwards to placate commercial competitors when they start whining about this sort of thing (the Trust are the guys who blocked BBC Radio 3 from releasing any more mp3s after a highly successful experiment with the Beethoven Symphonies, who mandated a 7-day expiry on DRM'd iPlayer content, and who are responsible for junking a range of popular BBC websites). I'm sure the Guardian group would love some pressure to be exerted to further reduce the activities of their main competitor in UK news...

Re:Not us.

[commodore64_love]

>>>There were. Specifically, the Church was [pissed].

Bzzzz. The Pope was one of the first persons to buy a printing press (3 in fact), so he could quickly disseminate his orders across Rome, Italy, and the whole of Europe. The Church of the Middle Ages was actually quite progressive - being the key employer of Renaissance artists, musicians, and engineers. If anybody was angry, it was the scribes who were laid-off by the Pope.

>>>There's plenty of creativity. The masses just don't want to pay

After the newspapers go out of business, the masses might not have any choice but to pay for their news, either online or on cable. Businesses just need to readjust to this new model.

Re:Not us.

[Znork]

The masses just don't want to pay.

The masses lack of desire to pay is really a minor part of the problem. The fact is that there is a vast overproduction of media; it's still geared towards smaller scale distribution. The single content creator who took up the time of five thousand eyeballs two decades ago can now take up the time of ten million eyeballs without any high distribution costs, yet we haven't gotten several thousand times as many hours per day to actually read it all.

Add to that various other issues such as the (unpaid) comments on most sites being variously more interesting and/or accurate than the actual content, the excessive pandering of media to various influences, etc, and you have a situation where there simply is close to no scarcity vs. demand to capitalize upon.

a lot of actually creative people in the process who would, you know, like to continue eating.

They're welcome to get a day job and blog about their opinions or about what's happening like the rest of the world. You don't get paid to do something you want to, you get paid to do something you otherwise don't want to do. The lucky few who get to combine enjoyment and pay are those whose enjoyment is so deviant as to be in a field with scarcity.

The desire to create, write, express and communicate is simply larger than the capacity for consumers to consume it. With the end result that there is no scarcity to make available any financial incentives.

Re:Not us.

[nschubach]

The desire to create, write, express and communicate is simply larger than the capacity for consumers to consume it. With the end result that there is no scarcity to make available any financial incentives.

And with the Internet, we will either see works of literary art that is really good and deserving of popular praise, or it will be swallowed up and the poor writers will have been found out and put out of jobs. It's simply competition where competition was scarce before. Write meaningful and interesting works and people will suffer through whatever ads or subscription they deem suitable.

The customer wins.

Re:Not us.

[FrozenFOXX]

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.

On the whole I completely agree with your post, however this bit is rather optimistic. Personally I think that in 100 years our grand children will have no books (no new ones anyway) and will be fighting with each other over drinkable water and safe shelter. But then I may be a bit pessimistic today.

Re:Not us.

[TheRaven64]

The solution is simple; realise that the value and the cost are in the same place, creating the work, not creating the copy. At the moment, a TV series is produced by making a pilot and then sending it around to various studios to try to get them to invest in making the series. The studios take the risk and then have to somehow recoup their investment by selling copies. This model can't last. Instead of trying to sell the idea to a studio, try selling it to the public. Put the pilot online with a no derived works license and ask individuals to invest. If you see and like the pilot, you put $20 into an escrow account. Once a total has been reached, the money is released to the team that produced the pilot and the produce the series. The people who put up the money get to download the show as soon as it's finished. You may recoup some of the initial investment by selling copies on DVD and so on, but the copies are not the valuable thing, they are a byproduct.

Go ahead, make my day

[HangingChad]

...'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..."

Oh, really? Okay, when Google stops indexing the content of your rag, then you can look for its rotting body in the ditch next to the information highway.

You should be glad Google isn't charging you to carry your stories.

No longer holds water...okay, skippy, let's see you come up with a way to promote your site that doesn't include Google. Then I'll be impressed. Cause, see, in all the excitement, I can't remember whether we spidered your worthless rag or not. What you have to ask yourself...is do you feel lucky? Well, do ya...punk?

Re:Shooting self in foot

[Dishevel]

Hence, Google is monetizing news content that they don't pay for.

OMG!

Google is making money off of making me more money! What am I gonna DO!?!?!?!?!?

Why are so many people such idiots?

The issue explained

[Bananenrepublik]

Since noone in this thread seems to have understood the issue, here's what I gathered after reading some German-language newspapers (I've not used google news in years, so please point out inaccuracies kindly):

So far, everytime you clicked on a story on google news, it took you to an article somewhere else. I.e., everytime there was an interesting story on google news, somebody else would share the profit.

But now google starts running news agency stories themselves. I.e., whenever someone clicks on an AP, say, story, they are redirected to a google news page that carries the AP story. Previously, it would have been some newspaper's page who happened to run that story.

So far so good. But how does google news decide which agency stories to place on their front page? For that, they use the story placement on the various news sites they're aggregating, and this is where it becomes unfair because this work is an essential part of running a news web site -- unordered newsfeeds aren't worth much, as otherwise everybody would be getting their news from ap.org or whatever.

In other words, by running stories from news agencies themselves, google has turned from someone benefitting the various news sites into a freeloader.

Same could be said for cable news

[proc_tarry]

Cable news channels (CNN/Fox/MSNBC/etc) don't contribute to the gathering and reporting of news, they only regurgitate (over and over and over and...) that of news gathering organizations (NYTimes/Washington Post/WSJ/AP/Reuters).

Re:OK

[sorak]

Then google will play fair, im sure these news agencies will miss being able to use google's services for free when researching...

I work for a newspaper. Trust me, they don't research.

Maybe I should have made myself clearer

[Bananenrepublik]

In other words, by running stories from news agencies themselves, google has turned from someone benefitting the various news sites into a freeloader.

No. If the AP wants to charge Google, they are free to do so. The papers that carry AP stories have not been granted an exclusive license.

I'll reply to you, but others have misunderstood me the same way. The work a newspaper does is in large parts selecting which agency stories are interesting or relevant. Google lets others do this work for them without compensation. That's the problem. I would have thought that I had made that point quite explicitly in my first point but judging from the numerous replies, apparently I didn't.

Google News in the UK doesn't seem to have ads

[Anonymous Coward]

If I click the links you supplied, there are no ads on them. I presume this is because I live in the UK and therefore my IP address is sent different content.

If you go to the Guardian Media Group's response that was reported on in TFA then you will see that nearly all of their complaint is actually about the BBC and Channel 4. They don't mention Google at all by name.

In the UK, the Guardian must compete with publicly funded broadcasters, and in a converging media environment, they are all going to put their content on the internet. Furthermore the Guardian is investing heavily in online video and audio streaming. So there is increasing competition for the same market.

The Guardian's strategy of late has been to try and expand their global readership, but this requires their brand to be recognised (search engine hits) and for people to visit their site, instead of sucking the news off the search engine's summary page. This is incompatible with going down the paid-for content route which has been attempted by other newspapers.

Re:So ask Google not to index you...

[tnk1]

Have you ever paid for comments or news, or even so much as clicked on an ad? I know I haven't and probably most people have not.

The site is free to me, and I patronize it because it is free. If they started charging, I wouldn't post or read here any more, I'd move to the next free site. So would most people.

That is why providing online news is a horrible way to try and earn revenue. People do care about quality, but people expect a big difference in quality between free and paid for. If you can't provide that, you can forget about making any money whatsoever directly. You're then stuck with ad revenue, and that makes you Google's bitch: all the advertisers care about are hits and no one gets you more hits than Google.

It is entirely possible at some point that News as we know it disappears entirely. At least the more in depth reporting, anyway. I think the media industry is going to have to hit a critical mass of failure before people realize that they're going to have to start paying for *something* again, or it simply won't exist past a certain point because there is no one who can make a living providing it.

News is probably not something that we want pared down to such levels that you have to be a hyper-efficient megacorporation to provide it. We've already seen some of the results of that sort of consolidation, and it's unlikely to get any better.