I think if pressure from "traditional" publishers keeps going, google is going to put plan B in action and go on to actually own the news as well. It's not hard for them to build an "uber for news" for journalists, editors and the common man, as in fact they have been subsidizing the open web with adsense for decades anyway. Maybe the next google reader will be about google's own news.
The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
21–30 of 181 posts
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#22What's stopping Google from refusing to pay the news sites, thus de-indexing them from Google entirely? If the relationship is "pay me for my content", then refusing to serve links to their media is absolutely within their rights.
Only the publishers have something to lose here.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#23> By pushing to the “link tax”, publishers are shooting themselves in the foot three times over. I don't think that's true at all. Beyond some short term traffic loss there are no negative consequences for the media industry if Google leaves this space. I suspect that's what big publishers actually aim for, they understand Google is not likely to pay and want to control how users discover news themselves.
The challenge publishers are fighting is effectively scabs in a union strike. If news publishers block Google, the one (or few) publisher who chooses not to gets all the traffic. And the problem with news is it's easily copied and redistributed. So the real reporters and journalists could all block Google and Google may try to sustain itself on pushing blogspam instead.
It's very possible that only government regulation which forces participation (such as the link tax) can actually work.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#24What's stopping Google from refusing to pay the news sites, thus de-indexing them from Google entirely? If the relationship is "pay me for my content", then refusing to serve links to their media is absolutely within their rights. Only the publishers have something to lose here.
that's what they did in spain
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#25"Traffic of news sites depends heavily on Google." It seems counterintuitive to me, at least for my use case. I rarely search for "news", I have a handful of websites to which I usually go to for them. I might search the name in Google if for whatever reason it doesn't show on the top results when I start typing the name on the search bar, because I'm too lazy to use bookmarks. Do most other people use aggregators or…
if you re searching for (or something) someone public you re likely to encounter news articles about them, many of them, and you usually read multiple to find what u re looking for. That creates a lot of traffic.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#26Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer. Even if Google links to a news site, I won’t click. It’s probably 30 secs for my new iPhone to partially fail loading, abruptly reload, and then auto play video I didn’t ask for... while covering the article with more ads that I have to c…
Browsing the commercial web without a host of filtering is like having unprotected intercourse with random strangers. Ad blockers will take care of the advertising, auto-playing video won't auto-play if there is no auto-play to begin with, Javascript is blocked by uBlock in 'advanced user' mode or by using a browser like Privacy Browser which blocks it by default (and allows per-site exceptions to be made). Sometimes there's nothing left after that, true, but mostly it reduces the ad-infested misery to manageable proportions. This works on Android, it might work on iOS as well. Then again, it might not given the limited choice of browsers on that platform.
To get the latest headlines I suggest using a RSS reader (e.g. 'News' on Nextcloud/Owncloud) and subscribing to those feeds which you deem interesting. This gives you headlines, sometimes with a snippet of content, often without but subscribe to a few different publications and you'll have the same news described using different headlines which often give enough insight into whether the item is worth your time.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#27The very idea that the aggregator (Google) should pay the advertisers (news sites) for directing traffic to them is just patently absurd. By common sense, it should be the other way around. Sadly, the traditional media has a massive conflict of interest here, so the issue passed at least in my part of EU with little to no ado.
But once the member states start enacting the directive to legislation, the manure will surely meet the propeller. No amount of regulation can change fundamental economic facts. Once Google News starts going black around EU, and the search engine traffic & revenue disappearing from the publishers, I am sure they will be soon very eager to license their content at zero cost, or less.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#28I'm a lot less worried about the "link tax" clauses than the copyright liability clause. Not because the link tax is a good idea but because it's a spectacular own goal that is mainly going to hurt the idiots who lobbied for it. Giving companies direct liability for policing copyright in user-uploaded content is a much bigger disaster, on two separate fronts, both highly damaging: 1) Implementing youtube-style conten…
No because you can publish it yourself. We don't need giant middlemen to use the Internet.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#29I'm a lot less worried about the "link tax" clauses than the copyright liability clause. Not because the link tax is a good idea but because it's a spectacular own goal that is mainly going to hurt the idiots who lobbied for it. Giving companies direct liability for policing copyright in user-uploaded content is a much bigger disaster, on two separate fronts, both highly damaging: 1) Implementing youtube-style conten…
No because you can publish it yourself. We don't need giant middlemen to use the Internet.
While that is true, it is quite difficult to compete against ad-revenue-driven content creation.
Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy
#30The very idea that the aggregator (Google) should pay the advertisers (news sites) for directing traffic to them is just patently absurd. By common sense, it should be the other way around. Sadly, the traditional media has a massive conflict of interest here, so the issue passed at least in my part of EU with little to no ado. But once the member states start enacting the directive to legislation, the manure will sur…
Is Google News really that big a deal for publishers?
Considering all the places where they voluntarily put their content (Facebook, Twitter, Apple News, etc...), is the loss of Google News really a problem?
I don't see anything magic about Google News that isn't done better (Apple News), or more thoroughly (Twitter) elsewhere.