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60M Euro Smooths Relations Between Google and French Publishers
New submitter Flozzin writes with news of some resolution to the long-standing dispute that some French publishers have had with Google for republishing snippets of news reports without sharing revenue earned from the ads run alongside. Now, reports the BBC, "Google has agreed to create a 60m euro ($82m; £52m) fund to help French media organisations improve their internet operations. It follows two months of negotiations after local news sites had demanded payment for the privilege of letting the search giant display their links. The French government had threatened to tax the revenue Google made from posting ads alongside the results."
Google is not paying for the "privilege" of showing links to newspapers on its search engine. They are paying because they created Google News which uses snippets of those stories to create a valuable news web site that brings in significant advertising revenue and traffic to other Google services.
The newspapers argument is that they built a news site for free using other people's content. If you go to the Google search page it doesn't tell you the news, you have to know it already in order to search for it. Google News gives you what the newspapers consider valuable information for free, using their content as a source. Additionally they are claiming that the click-through rates are very low because the multiple headlines and snippets often give people as much information as they want.
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One thing, I'm still not really clear on is whether they just "linked" to content or did they display those nifty "summary boxes" or whatever Google calls them when you do a search? (If you search for a person's name, it's now a short profile usually from Wikipedia with a photo)
If it's the summery (and I use that term loosely) then, I can understand. After all, most people just skim the summary while skipping most of the content unless it really grabs their attention, so they profited by advertising next to it without kicking back.
But if it's the former, I would have LOVED to see Google simply drop these people from the search ranks. In fact if their only crime was just displaying links, I'd rather they drop them now after payment saying : "We're very sorry we linked to your content without your permission. Now that we've paid you, we'll be sure never to repeat our mistake. We're really sorry!".
You don't say.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
If you don't like to have Google display your stuff. These French newspapers just do not seem to get the idea about how the Internet works. Please only publish your shite on your LAN if you don't want people to read it.
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I wonder - if they let google pay for it instead of plainly rejecting that their newspaper contents are displayed there - is that not a terribly stupid move? To me this is like introducing a middleman with a near-monopoly. Does this then also include the right to push these news snippets on android devices? I mean, i thought that the publisher should have learde the lesson from dealing with Apple in that respect.
So will the newspapers haver better card when negotiating the next time or worse?
Google should have just told them "you don't want us showing your links? Ok, have it your way", and dropped them into oblivion.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You never get rid of the Frog.
Poor show, Google. You had a chance to stare these dinosaurs down, and instead you chose to subsidise their legacy industry by giving in to their blackmail demands.
That is the way it's done in Europe, and in socialist France in particular, but I had hoped that Google of all entities would be an agent for changing that busted system.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
a) /. summaries are 3-4 times longer and more detailed than Google's - and mostly made by copy-pasting too /. has ads, subscriptions AND links to affiliate sites
b) "Didn't RTFA", i.e. lack of click-throughs is basically slashdotter's credo
c) Google doesn't make money on those snippets directly -
d) Sure, it's far from Google's top spot in Alexa ranking, but #1980 in the world is still a huge number of visitors
So, pay up?
then why is it worth a penny?
So why the hell are you making out they're something else?
Seems to me that the newspapers didn't have a leg to stand on, and Google gave them a face-saving concession to let everyone walk away with their heads held high.
Google doesn't really care about the $60m, it's a fairly small sum, doesn't set a terrible precedent, and saves them the time and effort of fighting this battle.
Meanwhile, the government has achieved a concession and can walk away without an embarrassing loss of face.
Finally, the newspapers can opt out of google news using their robots.txt if they want to (as they always could).
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I get the feeling Google paid this because the revenue from the adverts was more than 60m...not because the newspapers "won" in court.
They're more likely just paying Danegeld.
On the other hand, Google could have reasonably decided that if they start paying every site they index, that would put then out of business. Better to give up French news than signal they are ready to pay people for the privilege of sending them traffic. So paying off the French newspapers could increase profit in they very short term, but make business impossible in the long term. That would be dumb to set such a precedent, of course.
Also, t's not just the direct effect on Google. As someone else pointed out, sites like Slashdot post even longer summaries. Under such precedent, Slashdot can't have any more summaries without paying the site they link to. That is / would be bad for the internet, and Google knows that what's bad for the internet is bad for Google.
The tighter Google's grip the more AdSense clients slip through their fingers.