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A new licensing program to support the news industry
41–50 of 65 posts
Re: A new licensing program to support the news industry
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is corporation, of course it's for their benefit. Google is paying news organizations to stop chastising them for hurting their revenues. While they're at it, also coup some good PR. Does a reader want free* paywalled news? You have to use google. Does a news org want a pie of the Google free* news budget? You have to partner with Google. Solidifies even more Google position as an immovable object. One less re…
> Google is corporation, of course it's for their benefit. I'm thinking a diverse web that isn't controlled by another big actor might be enough of a long term benefit to google. Some times I get the feeling that these huge actors don't necessarily silo everything because they necessarily think it's a good idea, but because if they don't someone else will and that's a bad thing.
If there's one lesson to be drawn from the decade of Google just past, it's that they do not see a diverse web uncontrolled by large actors as beneficial to them. They want the web controlled by a big actor which is them.
"We have to silo things so no one else will" is an excuse for bad behavior, and a risible one at that. If Google wanted a web that couldn't be siloed, they have the money and brains to build that. They choose to build silos instead.
Re: A new licensing program to support the news industry
#43Eons ago when Google started aggregating news they greatly damaged the news industry. This is because you could start seeing the bigger story and the bias in the individual reporting. This was damaging to Fox News obviously.
It got worse unfortunately, the journalists were caught faking scenes. https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-s...
Then the fake news was discovered: https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg
Same newspaper, same story, contradictory reporting. Obviously this was done for different places.
People started discovering that news is heavily fake. Why buy something when they are outright lying to you? This is the reason the news industry is dying.
Re: A new licensing program to support the news industry
#44No one forced all news organizations to dump their in house advertising for easily ad blocked versions. They all had perfectly good reasons to not have to deal with the headache of losing money. But that would require keeping the ad sales team they had on board and making a similiar product online. But everyone got scared and lazy and saw a one quarter jump by dumping a bunch of staff.
The other “half” was classified ads though. Craigslist killed that and they had no answer to that. In retrospect maybe as an industry they could have launched something similar with a better UI and given it out for free and as they gained traction as premium features... but there’s no going back.
Re: A new licensing program to support the news industry
#45Just to get a sense for the crowd: am I the only one who doesn't care much about the news industry? Keeping with what's new in society is important insofar as having an informed population is vital for the correct functioning of a democracy. But the "news industry" is 95% gargabe and contributes zero to getting people informed. I firmly believe that if the news industry disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn't be much worse…
News Industry == a branch of the Entertainment Industry, so no. Journalism has been subverted by Activism, so we're in a bad state of things.
I would love to see a new model take form, one that restores actual journalism. A good business model to sustain is the hard part.
Re: A new licensing program to support the news industry
#46No one forced all news organizations to dump their in house advertising for easily ad blocked versions. They all had perfectly good reasons to not have to deal with the headache of losing money. But that would require keeping the ad sales team they had on board and making a similiar product online. But everyone got scared and lazy and saw a one quarter jump by dumping a bunch of staff.
Did the prices for ads not dramatically drop over time? To me, it feels like it was just market forces driving those decisions. They could have kept the ad sales team and fewer ads, but that doesn't mean that would have worked out.
Don't think so. Ads should be a good dollar per thousand views. Maybe 3 dollar for videos. Well known newspaper may be able to get more given their reputation and how many ads they plaster per page.
I think it's the economy of scale that's difficult to achieve. An employee has to bring in thousands of dollar just to pay for own salary, that's millions of views per month. The costs and revenues don't add up to sustain a large company and it has to spam (low quality) content to survive.
Re: A new licensing program to support the news industry
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google doesn't compete with papers but link papers to readers.
GOOG, FB, and AMZN extract all value out of the web, the music industry, retail, IT/cloud, soon e-learning, and basically everything, with content creators getting nothing. In music, we've already seen the effect of no monetary feedback for too many years now; save for very few counterexamples, we haven't seen any innovation since the 1990's; instead we have raised a generation of YouTube addicts. That is the problem…
What’s wrong with YouTube? I frequently find far better content there than anywhere in the traditional media. I think we’re really lucky to have YouTube - it’s one little ray of hope.
Re: A new licensing program to support the news industry
#48I know this is still a very rough idea, but I truly believe the future of content monetization is having some kind of decentralized or even federated payment system and digital wallet that's provider-agnostic and allows people to do "micro-donations", whether it's through upvotes, claps, time spent on the page, or a combination of all of those and more. If this depends on Google, or Paypal, or Apple, and you can only…
This sounds a lot like https://flattr.com/
Re: A new licensing program to support the news industry
#49Just to get a sense for the crowd: am I the only one who doesn't care much about the news industry? Keeping with what's new in society is important insofar as having an informed population is vital for the correct functioning of a democracy. But the "news industry" is 95% gargabe and contributes zero to getting people informed. I firmly believe that if the news industry disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn't be much worse…
I care about NEWS, factual reporting on current event We no longer have a news industry, we have a propaganda industry filled with political commenters and activists not journalists (that is both left and right)
I'd argue that in actual fact we have an advertising industry. The rest follows from that.
Re: A new licensing program to support the news industry
#50No one forced all news organizations to dump their in house advertising for easily ad blocked versions. They all had perfectly good reasons to not have to deal with the headache of losing money. But that would require keeping the ad sales team they had on board and making a similiar product online. But everyone got scared and lazy and saw a one quarter jump by dumping a bunch of staff.
> No one forced all news organizations to dump their in house advertising for easily blocked ad versions
Sure they did. The market 100% absolutely drove papers to transition to digital ads. If everyone in an industry makes the same change, how can you argue that said change wasn’t demanded by the market? To argue that they got lazy completely ignores the economic forces that have motivated print publications over the last 30 years. Scared? Sure. Lazy? Spend some time in a newsroom and see for yourself how desperate they are.
Newspapers used to have two primary sources of income: subscriptions and advertising. Subscriptions brought in pretty stable income while advertising brought in higher margins with increased variability. The two were also deeply linked: advertising rates were set largely on the amount of reach that a paper had through its distribution. Papers with higher distribution could command higher advertising fees.
Then the internet came along and hollowed out the subscription base for publications around the country. Income streams for papers decreased and became less stable at the same time. As subscriptions dropped, so did the paper’s ability to advertise. To supplement income shortfalls and try to figure out how to exists in the digital age, papers started adapting their business models for the internet. They saw decades of declining print advertising revenues, driven largely by a shift towards cheap and targeted online advertising.