Anti-trust q: how is celebrity net worth "your" business if ~100% of your users came from Google in the first place?
Seems to me, you're entitled to lock up the data behind a paywall, and Google is entitled to not send you its users. Google's users can switch search engines.m and some do, e.g. I use duckduckgo for incognito.
More to the point, how would regulating Google change any of this? Who would determine a fair price for every piece of information?
My sense: to the extent you don't care about the privacy impassioned of CNW, they're a legit value- added service. The exact economic value is somewhere between $0.01 per year and $100B. The free market can be cruel, but it's the best mechanism we have for price optimization.
Personally, I'd have pushed back on Google researchers and told them that we know our content is unique, and if they want accurate results, to consider entering into a legit partnership... for example, publish N year old data for free but require captcha/ToS (excluding search engines) for current data. Individual users may not care, but search engines will want the fresh stuff as a competitive matter.
Of course, this all assumes there isn't a second CNW competitor with good-enough data, offering it for less than CNW... and if less=free, then too bad CNW...
This to me is the weakest link in the CNW business: too easy to gather good enough data cheaply and there's not enough value beyond the basic number e.g. what's the breakdown of CelebrityXs NW, NW over time etc etc - very little market for this premium content.
Put another way, i could create a website called "what's the current time in Minsk?" but its economic value would be closer to $.01/yr because it's undifferentiated and there's no premium value, so search engines can and should just display the time.
Now let's take weather: in some places the weather is pretty easy (see LA Story, with Steve Martin)
and in others (cough nyc cough) the free feeds like NWS are crap and you never know whether to pack an umbrella. Accurate weather for NYC would be amazing value to millions of people and highly differentiated. The problem is that this data is super hard to get - even current data are often wrong! But if by some miracle you had this data, no way would i publish it - instead show that you've got the goods and license it. Google might play cheapskate but the weather apps would pay up and probably uber/lyft, the city of NY etc. Once you've got a few customers then approach Google: this data would be useful across the enterprise. You'd make a killing. But oh yeah, it's really freaking hard (unlike CNW).