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Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

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Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#191

Post by PeterisP »

paxys wrote: post #179
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The news media industry is dying because of tech" is a massively successful myth perpetuated by the news media industry. Why do you think that's a myth? The news industry was always reliant on advertising for revenue. The tech giants of the Internet era all figured out how to better target advertisements, so a huge amount of that advertising money shifted from news to tech giants (and not just tech "giants" - Crai…

The news industry is still getting money via ads, same as before. The only thing that has changed is the broker that is connecting them to the advertisers. Print media had its own ad ecosystem, and the online one is controlled by Google and Facebook (but of course the media companies can use whoever they want or even talk to advertisers directly). So what is the complaint exactly? That Google shouldn't take a cut? Ex…

No, the news industry isn't still getting money same as before - the total ad revenue the industry is getting has significantly decreased.

Newspaper ad revenue has simply collapsed (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/28/audiences...) and it's not being replaced by digital media as digital ad revenue for news industry (as opposed to total digital ad revenue) is shrinking every year.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#192

Post by whycome »

dylan604 wrote: post #171
reissbaker wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journalism quality has tanked, and social media acts as some degree of (free+fast) competition, furthering the death spiral.

To expand, journalists used to actually investigate which took time which means it took money so that the story released had lots of corroborating sources, scrutinized by editors, and then released as a complete story. That might have meant things like actually interviewing people, requesting documents from places, or visiting the places in question. Today, it is just a bunch of people collecting tweets of random peo…

The most infuriating thing is that an article can take absolutely any stance on an issue simply by cherry picking tweets to go along with it.

News has become a weird kind of curation market. And the funny thing about this payment arrangement that publishers want is that they are not paying any of those tweeters who may be breaking the news or themselves curating the info.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#193

Post by bombcar »

adrr wrote: post #135
burnte wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually agree with it too. Google and Facebook aren't the reason news outlets have cash problems and a free teat to latch on to isn't the answer. News is important, but let's fix the problem in a better way.

What is the problem with news? Why aren't people willing to pay for it?

Because as much as people like to pretend different, news is a form of entertainment.

Everyone loves reading stories that confirm everything they already know.

Big real news spreads like wildfire, but news as it is consumed is entertainment.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#194

Post by whycome »

adrr wrote: post #181
internetter wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree with all this, though my take away is that there's a big vicious cycle of adblockers and paywalls where they keep getting worse. I can't afford to subscribe to every newspaper I read. All the local (and smaller national) papers should unionize and make one subscription for something like $20 a month

Isn't that apple news+?

The publishers didn't do that and it's Apple-only.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#196

Post by whycome »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #185
olyjohn wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's stop trying to pick a side here... Maybe it's more of a symbiotic relationship. Google gets a useful news page, the news media get links to their articles. I honestly could care less about either of them. I think they should just fight it out on their own and keep our legal system and tax payers time and money out of it.

> Let's stop trying to pick a side here... Maybe it's more of a symbiotic relationship. There's definitely some symbiosis here, but it's ultimately Google that's dependent on the news (and other) sites' content, which it gets for free. That is, the news sites (and other content providers) could exist without Google. But, Google could not exist without their content. At least that's my observation. So, I wasn't pickin…

Those sites rely on sites like Facebook and Google linking to their content to lead readers in. With the ban on Canada their public campaign has made that obvious.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#197

Post by CM30 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #149
kemayo wrote: post #6

I agree with Google on this one. Charging a fee just for linking to something is a bad idea. It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing, and there's clearly some sort of spectrum from "just the URL" to "AI synopsis of the entire article". But at the level we see on Google News (headline + maybe a picture), I don't feel there's any good justification for charging.

Just to think about this more, are there any other business types, besides online news, where your success so radically depends on the decisions (read google news ranking and summarization algorithms) of some other business that you have zero relations with. Google news+facebook+twitter can drastically change the revenue of any online news site with an internal decision. Where else do we see something like this in th…

Virtually every product and service with a website and social media presence? If you get banned from Google, your visibility online pretty much falls off a cliff and your sales will likely never recover. So anyone making money from a website is dependent on Google and other search engines... well mostly Google indexing said site.

Also, any business whose livelihood depends on a large company's platform. Businesses and entrepreneurs selling their work on Amazon and eBay, YouTubers and Twitch streamers making content for those platforms, influencers in general given their reliance on social media services...

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#198

Post by scelerat »

adrr wrote: post #135
burnte wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually agree with it too. Google and Facebook aren't the reason news outlets have cash problems and a free teat to latch on to isn't the answer. News is important, but let's fix the problem in a better way.

What is the problem with news? Why aren't people willing to pay for it?

I think very few people ever "paid for news" -- the newsroom of most publications have always been highly subsidized by advertising and classifieds, and perhaps newstand sales. Google (and others) and Craigslist (and others) quickly dominated advertising and classifieds in the early 2000s, and I can't remember the last time I saw someone reading a newspaper on a train

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#199

Post by warkdarrior »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #83
umvi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax on linking = less linking. The whole thing smells like wealth distribution ("hmm, the journalism industry is struggling, but the tech industry is booming. The tech industry interacts with the journalism industry, maybe we can help the journalism industry by mandating a new wealth gradient flowing from one to support the other?")

I’m very pro capitalism but I do think redistribution makes sense in the context of giant corporations that are effectively immune to competition. Why do you think Google and Amazon and others can create entire products that never make a profit for years and then unceremoniously shut them down or reduce their investments in them? Everyone else has to try to survive based on their merits and actually make money. Platf…

> Why do you think Google and Amazon and others can create entire products that never make a profit for years and then unceremoniously shut them down or reduce their investments in them?

It seems like Google and Amazon shutting down or divesting some products would make room for a lot of competitors to step in and dominate that space.

Re: Google threatens to cut off news after California proposes paying media outlets

#200

Post by unclebucknasty »

whycome wrote: post #196
unclebucknasty wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's stop trying to pick a side here... Maybe it's more of a symbiotic relationship. There's definitely some symbiosis here, but it's ultimately Google that's dependent on the news (and other) sites' content, which it gets for free. That is, the news sites (and other content providers) could exist without Google. But, Google could not exist without their content. At least that's my observation. So, I wasn't pickin…

Those sites rely on sites like Facebook and Google linking to their content to lead readers in. With the ban on Canada their public campaign has made that obvious.

>Those sites rely on sites like Facebook and Google linking to their content to lead readers in

Of course, that's the way it is. But, is it a good thing that they've intermediated all of the world's content?

It's easy to argue that the problem is exactly that a relative handful of sites have a monopoly on traffic and, what's more, they've gained that monopoly for free.

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