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.'"
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.
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.
There aren't even any advertisements on Google News. The Guardian seems to have at least two big ads on every article page (though, thankfully, not the home page).
So, the money quote from the Guardian's statement is this: "The argument has traditionally been that search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content, and this is enough to make the relationship symbiotic and equal.... However, there is a vast over-supply in the market of advertising inventory, and yields have come under severe downward pressure. As a result, the value of the traffic generated by search engines and aggregators has reduced significantly."
In other words, if Google stopped sending traffic to the Guardian's web site, their ad revenue would go up!
Err... wait.
Did anybody think this through before going public?
Ah, yes! They want 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." In other words, they want to tell another company, which offers a free service, how to run that free service, so it better supports their ad-driven service! OK, that makes much more sense.
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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
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
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?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
"So, you're saying that people can't tell anybody else what articles your paper has today?"
That sums it up succinctly. Google doesn't (aside from it's cache) serve up the article. All it does is state what articles are available and where they can be found. Exactly what someone saying "Hey, the Guardian had this article yesterday on page 17, you gotta read it." is doing.
Alternatively, Google should simply stop spidering the objecting sites. End of problem. Well, for Google anyway. The lack of traffic may cause a problem for those sites, but that's what they asked for.
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?
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Google should simply not link to Guardian content in any way, shape, or form. Any attempt to access Guardian content on purpose via Google (e.g. site:guardian.co.uk any-search-term) should be diverted to a copy of the Guardian's legal complaint.
While this would effectively make the Guardian publications disappear from the Internet, that seems to be what the Guardian is asking for. So let them have it.
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