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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

#261

Post by asow92 »

xedrac wrote: post #259
asow92 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that: 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high. 2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue. 3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril. 4) If governments pay news o…

> 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high. So much of news today is not even worthy of my attention, let alone my money.

What about news specific to your locale?

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

#262

Post by drawkward »

wustangdan wrote: post #247
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…

> I have sympathy for the journalists actually doing journalism You know that with Substack all these actual journalists are having no issue getting paid very well. I'm not sure why we'd want to expand NPR or make more NPR's. We need less of their low-quality and biased journalism IMO, not more.

[flagged]

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

#263

Post by candiddevmike »

asow92 wrote: post #258
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…

As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that: 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high. 2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue. 3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril. 4) If governments pay news o…

RE: 4, NPR seems to do OK, same with the BBC.

You're choosing to implement all of these terrible things by continuing your employment, so you "not wanting them" is kind of moot. Find a different job if you genuinely don't agree with what you're building. I'm a firm believer that companies would stop doing this kind of crap if we, collectively as tech workers (even better as a union!), stopped implementing it.

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

#264

Post by what »

jtriangle wrote: post #71
estebarb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case Google should pay everyone they link to, not just the ones with politician friends that can lobby for themselves. If they don't want a Google to index them they can use robots.txt to prevent it.

Exactly. If google showing your site in search results is a problem, it's trivial to remove yourself from said search results, and to prevent your site from ever being crawled in the first place. What's actually happening here is that news media orgs were in a huge bubble because of the advent of the internet, and they've failed to monetize effectively. So they're looking for a revenue source to shore up their failed…

What about their knowledge panels? Site owners would like the links without the information being summarized as the top result.

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

#265

Post by nickpsecurity »

philipkglass wrote: post #151
adrr wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Facts are not copyrightable, so the meat of a story spreads quickly and with very little money changing hands. One subscriber to the Los Angeles Times can legally and immediately share the factual essence of an article via social media, personal web site, email, or anything else. From there it can be reshared indefinitely. Only people who really want to read the original reporting in full will pay to subscribe to the…

“Facts are not copyrightable”

Does anyone have any good pages on that which go into how to extract facts without copyright infringement? And for purposes of creating independent, educational works from those facts?

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

#266

Post by bsder »

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…

Anything video.

No matter how hard you try to avoid it, some asshole will always post any video you make to YouTube immediately and probably try to monetize it.

Given how much money Google collects for YouTube, they should get fined through the roof when they allow somebody to upload something they don't have the rights to.

The porn companies showed that you solve this technically. However, Google will fight this to the very end.

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

#267

Post by Solvency »

cush wrote: post #252
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 publishers have spent the last couple decades making their websites absolutely unusable To appease Google… Conversely, NYTs site is stellar. It’s fast and gorgeous and the articles are well-written and not full of clickbait and SEO spam. The games have no ads and there’s nothing pushing you to read more. No feed. No algorithm. NYT got the hell away from SEO and focus on the customers, who decide with their wal…

uh what? the average news site is hacked together by a motley crew of non-programmer marketing interns who apply every possible bloated inefficient awful ad/tracking/targeting/react/javascript spawn of satan into their site as possible, all written by the worst programmers in the world

none of this is to "appease google". it's malicious incompetence, malaise, and cynical stupidity.

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

#268

Post by asow92 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #263
asow92 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer who works for one of these news publishers you have little sympathy for, what I can tell you is that: 1) Most people don't want to pay for news. Even $1/year is too high. 2) Ad CPMs are low—especially on iOS thanks to Apple's ATT—so we need more ads to make the same amount of revenue. 3) "SEO clickbait" (especially Taboola) helps keep the lights on. Click at your own peril. 4) If governments pay news o…

RE: 4, NPR seems to do OK, same with the BBC. You're choosing to implement all of these terrible things by continuing your employment, so you "not wanting them" is kind of moot. Find a different job if you genuinely don't agree with what you're building. I'm a firm believer that companies would stop doing this kind of crap if we, collectively as tech workers (even better as a union!), stopped implementing it .

NPR is very biased: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/business/media/npr-critic...

And to be honest, I don't think most of these things are terrible per se, albeit mildly annoying. Also, I don't see what you're suggesting as realistic, but idealistic. You can try to unionize developers, but good luck with that because you'll just be replaced with overseas contractors. I'd rather keep my job and feed my family, thanks.

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

#269

Post by [deleted] »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #204
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…

Maybe this isn't quite the same thing, but I had been threatened with legal action in the past for linking to a site's public assets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26550846

[deleted]

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

#270

Post by jeffbee »

brevitea wrote: post #256
jeffbee wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and Meta had each been funding journalism — actual journalism, not vulture capital clickbait — voluntarily, which they are now not. Google is now paying $100m, most of which goes to huge corporations. Meta pulled out altogether, slashing traffic to canadian media sites by half.

How were Meta and Google funding "actual" journalism vs. clickbait? Do you have any sources on that?

Google offered News Showcase, where they paid participating orgs for quality content curated by professional editors. They were paying $25 million a year to Canadian journalists. That program is now not available in Canada. Facebook had a similar program of the same scale that they also pulled.
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