Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

mondaynote.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 181 posts

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#101

Post by r00fus »

vesinisa wrote: post #27

The very idea that the aggregator (Google) should pay the advertisers (news sites) for directing traffic to them is just patently absurd. By common sense, it should be the other way around. Sadly, the traditional media has a massive conflict of interest here, so the issue passed at least in my part of EU with little to no ado. But once the member states start enacting the directive to legislation, the manure will sur…

Or maybe not? I mean Bing, et. al. would kill to dominate one area of search, and MS has burned billions so far with middling success. What's a few more $B if you can get dominance in the EU?

Trading one monopoly for another may be exactly what the TradMed has been wanting - with the carrot that they'll switch back if "the price is right".

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#102

Post by dahdum »

vesinisa wrote: post #27

The very idea that the aggregator (Google) should pay the advertisers (news sites) for directing traffic to them is just patently absurd. By common sense, it should be the other way around. Sadly, the traditional media has a massive conflict of interest here, so the issue passed at least in my part of EU with little to no ado. But once the member states start enacting the directive to legislation, the manure will sur…

This situation reminds me of Google Shopping...used to be completely free to post products and get them included in the search results as "snippets". Now it's 100% paid, and expensive.

Google News may go dark, but I wonder if they won't come up with some nice new ad format for publishers to feed their stories into, for a market based price, of course.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#103

Post by ocdtrekkie »

ForHackernews wrote: post #69
vorpalhex wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's very possible that only government regulation which forces participation (such as the link tax) can actually work. Why don't we just make Google give every news org a few million a year then? Why pretend it's anything else but Google directly paying for the news? Side point, if news subscriptions were reasonably priced (upfront pricing, and billed monthly instead of this odd weekly nonsense), they would probab…

> Why don't we just make Google give every news org a few million a year then? That sounds sensible enough to me. As an example, Canada taxed blank CDs and CDR drives and distributed the revenue to their music industry.

Isn't this the same as the link tax? Except that the link tax clearly assigns the money to the news outlets who are actually producing the news people are reading on Google, whereas "every news org" is hard to quantify and discerning who should receive how much funding is a complicated question otherwise?

Is it possible people are opposed to the link tax not because of what it does, but the marketing they've been exposed to characterizing it as bad? Even the description "link tax" is oddly loaded, as "snippet tax" would be far more accurate, to that it applies to lifted content, not "literally the URL".

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#104

Post by superflyguy »

ben_w wrote: post #46
IanCal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Implementing youtube-style content id will be a huge burden for small companies. There's stuff in every version I've read about the measures required being different due to size so I don't really follow the point here. And people on the other end (the uploaders) must have recourse, there's a mandated appeals process unlike the current situation.

That’s good info about #1, because it seems to be an O(n * m) problem where n is number of existing copyrighted works and m is the number of uploads. I’m more concerned about the way copyright itself may need to change to work sensibly with this — according to several UK lawyers I’ve talked to, under UK law any work is copyrighted the moment it is put down in a fixed medium. For example, this comment, the moment it i…

That's the same as elsewhere though. You never need to state something is copyright; it already is.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#105

Post by throw2016 »

This article is a one sided look at how publishers benefit from Google without considering the other side, at all. This is not helpful for informed discussion.

If Google is 'helping' these publishers then the counterpoint is these publishers are also 'helping' Google by making the content at their cost in the first place. Without their content what will Google search? Wikipedia, blogs?

Without news content google search users will not get news context about their search queries so the search engine will lack a critical perspective and become lower quality, which will take billions of dollars of value off Google, lower its value to users and make room for other options.

Let's not pretend Google is not benefiting from news content. And since people clearly value news content producers can generate value outside of Google, and Google will need to pay to make money from that content or do without. Targeting a predatory model will make space for better models and ideas to emerge.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#106

Post by wpietri »

vesinisa wrote: post #27

The very idea that the aggregator (Google) should pay the advertisers (news sites) for directing traffic to them is just patently absurd. By common sense, it should be the other way around. Sadly, the traditional media has a massive conflict of interest here, so the issue passed at least in my part of EU with little to no ado. But once the member states start enacting the directive to legislation, the manure will sur…

I agree, and also think it's very easily worked around in a way that is detrimental to publishers.

If I were in the shoes of a Google News product manager, my take would be, "Fine, I won't show your snippets then." I'd show a summary and then headline links to the various news sources. (Or if that's too much for the law, just links with the title of the paper.)

The number of news stories is small enough that the bulk of summaries could be quickly written by humans. But I suspect Google has enough ML magic that they can easily generate adequate summaries for most articles, with a small team of humans that reviews and improves prominent ones.

This would be just as good from the consumer perspective, and it's another opportunity for Google to build up a data-driven moat. But from the newspaper perspective, they lose out: anything that makes their voice unique or distinctive will get squeezed out. It would further commodify news, which is the last thing newspapers want.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#107

Post by eiaoa »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #66
eiaoa wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer. But that's an effect , though maybe one that will create a vicious cycle. It's not the cause. The revenue rug was pulled out from under local news websites, and they're struggling to keep the lights on. Advertising and tracking are how…

Advertising is different from Javascript. Advertising can simply be a load of images that are easy to render, as in traditional periodicals. Web pages suck because it's easier for a site to instruct the client to download and run analytics software from 3rd parties, instead of doing that work server side.

> Advertising is different from Javascript. Advertising can simply be a load of images that are easy to render, as in traditional periodicals. Web pages suck because it's easier for a site to instruct the client to download and run analytics software from 3rd parties, instead of doing that work server side.

My understanding is that one thing that Google, Facebook, and the internet as a whole have done is to make online advertising an incredibly high-volume, low-margin business. Trackerless banner ads pay almost nothing. Trackers push the margins up, but Google and Facebook suck up most of the air in that room.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#108

Post by analyst74 »

sigstoat wrote: post #73
notatoad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most people do need middlemen though. if you require everybody to host their own content on their own websites, you go back to the old days of the internet where the only content was published by nerds. which had a certain charm, but was a lot smaller and less inclusive than today's internet.

it could be even easier than it was. there's no reason someone couldn't make a small bit of desktop software which, fed AWS/Azure/GCP/DO/github pages/etc credentials, set up every aspect of a website, and automatically synced some local directory of content to the relevant site.

There is also monetization, are you going to sell the content by piece? subscription? ads?

All those things require engineering, sales and/or other technical know-how.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#109

Post by nevez »

buboard wrote: post #24
c16 wrote: post #22

What's stopping Google from refusing to pay the news sites, thus de-indexing them from Google entirely? If the relationship is "pay me for my content", then refusing to serve links to their media is absolutely within their rights. Only the publishers have something to lose here.

that's what they did in spain

They didn't de-index the sites in Spain, they just closed Google News.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#110

Post by HissingMachine »

After numerous sites will have to block access to them for users coming from Europe, even if it is for a short while to implement tools to comply with these regulations, people will not start to hate them, they won't start hating Google, Youtube or whatever site they are barred from accessing, they will start to hate the EU. Anti-EU sentiment will get a big boost and they can't blame anyone else than themselves, good job and good luck bureaucrats.
Post reply on HN