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Should Google Be Forced To Pay For News?

Posted by timothy on from the according-to-his-need dept.

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.'"

14 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Not us. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Not us. by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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    2. Re:Not us. by maxume · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    3. Re:Not us. by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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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    4. Re:Not us. by JWSmythe · · Score: 5, Informative

          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.

             

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    5. Re:Not us. by nevillethedevil · · Score: 5, Funny

      Thanks I'd love an omelette right about now

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  2. So ask Google not to index you... by Ben+Jackson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If the benefit is so "heavily skewed" then it should be a no-brainer to ask Google not to index your news site.

    1. Re:So ask Google not to index you... by tolan-b · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Indeed. They claim that the click-throughs they get aren't worth it, then say they couldn't live without them. So they pretty much by definition *are* worth it.

      I don't envy them though, providing online news is a horrible way to try to earn revenue.

  3. I call Bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. RSS feed by Locklin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  5. Money for nothing... and the chicks for free. by Wrexs0ul · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?
  6. The issue explained by Bananenrepublik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:The issue explained by AndersOSU · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  7. Maybe I should have made myself clearer by Bananenrepublik · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.