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

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 448 posts

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

#211

Post by bawolff »

aetherson wrote: post #141
adrr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because people don't value it. I mean, seriously, that's the reason. Back when newspapers were healthy, basically there was all this stuff that was bundled with the actual news that was of more immediate utility to people: classifieds, movie reviews, comics, coupons. And there was less competition for people's leisure time. News is now in a very competitive leisure time landscape and is debundled from stuff that's of…

I think that is a part of it, but its not just that.

News provied two services in the old days: access and filtering.

Back in the day you couldn't easily get things straight from the horses mouth, now you can just go to their website.

If you did have direct access in the old days, it was all way too much. There was no way to filter to 10-minutes worth of top goings on. Now a days you can just look at what is upvoted and stop once you have read enough.

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

#212

Post by whycome »

kemayo wrote: post #74
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #55

Isn’t the issue that Google links to websites and then reduces their commercial viability by showing summaries in search pages or by having their AI present the data without letting the website get the traffic? If so, I think a link tax is justified. At that point, Google is creating value for itself by removing value from others so it seems fair to me. And we don’t need the law to be perfect - let’s just make it app…

Can't speak for what Google plans to do in the future, but currently news results in search can either be a "top stories" block at the top of the results, or regular search results. In "top stories" you get just the headline and maybe an associated picture. In regular search results you get the headline, and a fragment of the first sentence of the article. If seeing the headline and maybe a tiny fragment of the first…

> If seeing the headline and maybe a tiny fragment of the first words is enough to remove commercial viability, there's a lot of things that do that.

Heck, that's what twitter is great at. If there's a news story, you can get the gist pretty quickly on there.

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

#213

Post by ninkendo »

bawolff wrote: post #206
babypuncher wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was just plain hyperlinks, I would agree with you. Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them so that most people never even need to click the link. Google is getting most of the value from the articles written while not doing the actual work to make them. The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere. It's worse in pla…

To be fair - that's what news sites do - they summarize information happening elsewhere. Its hard to claim google is in the wrong for doing to news sites what news sites have been doing to other people since forever.

At some point someone is actually doing journalism though (in the best case at least.) News outlets that summarize things from e.g. Reuters or AP tend to have agreements which pay money for the information. You could reasonably argue that google should be doing the same, right?

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

#214

Post by bawolff »

alistairSH wrote: post #182
imzadi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the issue is that people aren't willing to pay for it. The problem is, there aren't currently good options for paying for it. If I go to a news site and it is paywalled, I just leave. I am not going to subscribe to every single newspaper. If I could easily pay for today's paper (not an individual news story or a full subscription) without giving up all my persona info, I would probably buy 2 - 3 papers…

$40/year for the WaPo and you can pay with PayPal or Apple. You don’t give them any more money than any other online vendor.

That price point seems high.

For example, Netflix is $84/year. Netflix content seems a lot more valuable then simply twice what WaPo provides.

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

#215

Post by Ferret7446 »

babypuncher wrote: post #203
zmmmmm wrote: post #170

I have sympathy for news publishers but I worry a lot about the principle of asserting that linking to something is an act that the link target has proprietary rights to over. At some level, it is almost a free speech issue. If I can't refer to what you are saying, without owing you something, you have power over not just my speech, but a power to limit how your work is subjected to criticism and debate. It's effecti…

If it was just plain hyperlinks, I would agree with you. Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them so that most people never even need to click the link. Google is getting most of the value from the articles written while not doing the actual work to make them. The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere. It's worse in pla…

There's nothing wrong with that. Only expression is covered by copyright; re-interpretation/summarizing isn't.

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

#216

Post by jrpt »

scelerat wrote: post #198
adrr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The circulation subscriptions were a substantial part of their revenue, however you're right that ads were even larger. I don't think it's fair to say few people ever paid for it though. Subscriptions were important too.

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

#217

Post by Ferret7446 »

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.

> It does get fuzzier if you're also summarizing

Does it? If I summarize a book, do I need to pay a fee? News (much like recipes) is not directly covered by copyright (facts cannot be copyrighted). Only the expression (exact wording) is (which is one reason why recipes are usually accompanied by a personal story).

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

#218

Post by b112 »

bawolff wrote: post #206
babypuncher wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was just plain hyperlinks, I would agree with you. Google is scraping metadata and articles, and summarizing them so that most people never even need to click the link. Google is getting most of the value from the articles written while not doing the actual work to make them. The whole thing could have been avoided if Google and social media stopped embedding previews and summaries everywhere. It's worse in pla…

To be fair - that's what news sites do - they summarize information happening elsewhere. Its hard to claim google is in the wrong for doing to news sites what news sites have been doing to other people since forever.

If Google was doing what news sites did, it would have journalists writing articles, researching data, investigating, etc. Yet they do none of that.

Your statement is absurd.

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

#219

Post by bawolff »

bevekspldnw wrote: post #125
cherioo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question, why don’t publishers stop using doubleclick and build their own?

Google has thoroughly rigged the space, including manipulating bid stream data to underpay publishers while overcharging the advertiser. It’s called Project Bernake which is public now. I have it on reliable sources there is a lot more beyond that. The search antitrust suit was garbage, but the coming trials in the ad auction suit is going to hurt a lot more. They total lost their way, it’s actually insane when you’l…

> Google has thoroughly rigged the space, including manipulating bid stream data to underpay publishers while overcharging the advertiser

That seems an argument for news publishers rolling their own, not against.

What you are allegeding is nasty, but it should also make it easier to build a coompeting service not harder.

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

#220

Post by izacus »

akira2501 wrote: post #187
notatoad wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I have sympathy for news publishers i have very little sympathy for news publishers. I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism, but news publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable, so that unless somebody links to an article externally there's almost no point in going to their site directly. And even after you've followed that link it's almost impossib…

> News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault. To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play. > make sure the fund is actually funding journalism I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can mana…

> To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play.

This outright BS. Noone asked them to fill their sites with popup videos, popup ads, spam and other garbage.

Noone asked them to spam people with notifications in iOS either and Google didn't force them to do that either.

Stop blaming Google for the deep rot within the news industry, they did it to themselves.

Post reply on HN