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Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

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Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#21

Post by tombert »

imachine1980_ wrote: post #14
jeffbee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously newspapers spent the entire 20th century charging people as much as $100 for classified ads, job postings, real estate listings, etc. Craigslist murdered them and they deserved it . Everything after that has been sour grapes.

Do you realy think the value they give to communities is less than have 100$ job post

I think local papers give lots of value, but at the same time if I am a for-profit business, my goal isn't to help out the local newspaper, it's to make (and possibly save) as much money as possible. I don't know the success numbers of job classified ads, but I doubt it comes anywhere near the success numbers of places like Indeed or StackOverflow Jobs or Dice, all of which charge substantially less money and reach a larger audience.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#22

Post by ghaff »

mdoms wrote: post #9
freediver wrote: post #4

Newspapers allowed Google and Facebook to drag them to their territory of online ad-monetized business models in which they have no way of competing (because of tech discrepancy). This then led to deterioration of journalism and its inevitable transformation into sensationalism and entertainment, again driven by the incentives of the ad-monetized business model, because clickbait makes more ad money. It is a sad stat…

News media organisations were forced into bed with Google and Facebook by a tragedy of the commons. Readership was going to go to those platforms as long as any small proportion of media organisations published there. Smaller orgs like the ones involved in these lawsuits had only two options - publish on FB/G or miss out on a large proportion of readership. > monetize like news were monetized for hundreds of years -…

Yes, my understanding was always that subscriptions and newsstand sales basically paid to get a physical paper into people's hands. But actually creating the content for that physical paper was paid for by advertising. I'm sure the specifics varied but, to a first approximation, those were the basic economics.

Put the paper online for free and, again to a first approximation, you now need the same advertising revenue to support the same reporting, editing, etc. But with the classifieds blown up and advertising generally going from print dollars to digital dimes, the revenue available to put out a newspaper cratered while the relevant costs didn't go down much at all.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#23

Post by enobrev »

cageface wrote: post #8
freediver wrote: post #4

Newspapers allowed Google and Facebook to drag them to their territory of online ad-monetized business models in which they have no way of competing (because of tech discrepancy). This then led to deterioration of journalism and its inevitable transformation into sensationalism and entertainment, again driven by the incentives of the ad-monetized business model, because clickbait makes more ad money. It is a sad stat…

Newspapers and magazines have derived most of their revenue from ads since long before Google and Facebook. They're lucky to break even on subscription fees.

This is right. It's not Facebook that ate the media's lunch, it was craigslist, ebay, and any marketplace that allows free listings. They've been trying to make up that revenue ever since. Subscriptions were always a pittance.

That's not to say Facebook didn't make things worse. They make everything worse; They even ruined wishing friends happy birthday. But the news vs the internet is a much older story than middle-aged social media platforms.

The news companies had their opportunity to win this, but they moved far too late.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#24

Post by cblconfederate »

desireco42 wrote: post #7

That is all fine and dandy, but if Google and FB decide to drop them all-together, and offer you news that isn't "protected", then they are screwed even more then today. It is dying industry, well, the model is dying, not the need for news.

It's been dying for too long, but it isn't really, no? What gets to the frontpages of HN and reddit are copyedited articles, not tweets. And like 85% of my twitter timeline is links to those articles. So, who are we fooling, people do want to read edited articles.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#25

Post by saalweachter »

ghaff wrote: post #22
mdoms wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News media organisations were forced into bed with Google and Facebook by a tragedy of the commons. Readership was going to go to those platforms as long as any small proportion of media organisations published there. Smaller orgs like the ones involved in these lawsuits had only two options - publish on FB/G or miss out on a large proportion of readership. > monetize like news were monetized for hundreds of years -…

Yes, my understanding was always that subscriptions and newsstand sales basically paid to get a physical paper into people's hands. But actually creating the content for that physical paper was paid for by advertising. I'm sure the specifics varied but, to a first approximation, those were the basic economics. Put the paper online for free and, again to a first approximation, you now need the same advertising revenue…

Subscriptions also sell ads.

If you can tell an advertiser you've got XX,000 subscribers paying some nominal amount for your newspaper, that tells them that there are that many people who (probably) read the paper, and that they have some small amount of disposable income.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#26

Post by ghaff »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #13

The newspapers have missed the opportunity to monetize for themselves and now need to roll out everything anew. As they should, today's google amp links are much worse content wise than daily mail articles, and that's one hell of a low bar.

>The newspapers have missed the opportunity to monetize for themselves

What do you think that opportunity was for most even decent-size city newspapers? A few national/international brands have done OK but that's because the NYT, say, has subscribers all over the world. Even something like the San Francisco Chronicle never had that same opportunity.

Maybe if everyone had pushed back harder on making content available for free and paywalls were more the norm in the early days of the newspapers going online. But I sort of doubt that would really have worked.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#27

Post by ghaff »

saalweachter wrote: post #25
ghaff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, my understanding was always that subscriptions and newsstand sales basically paid to get a physical paper into people's hands. But actually creating the content for that physical paper was paid for by advertising. I'm sure the specifics varied but, to a first approximation, those were the basic economics. Put the paper online for free and, again to a first approximation, you now need the same advertising revenue…

Subscriptions also sell ads. If you can tell an advertiser you've got XX,000 subscribers paying some nominal amount for your newspaper, that tells them that there are that many people who (probably) read the paper, and that they have some small amount of disposable income.

That was of course the long-time model of the trade press. You had XX,000 qualified subscribers and you supported sending an issue out every week or month with ads sold against those subscribers.

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#29

Post by claudiulodro »

13415 wrote: post #15
NikolaNovak wrote: post #2

On one hand, if there is a new media outlet via new distribution model that's winning the market, fair. So if an online-only news source is taking away traffic and money away from physical newspapers, there's part of me that'll feel sad, but whatcha gonna do. On the other hand though, it's a completely different model in my mind to scrape/link/copy/extract somebody else's hard work and news and editorials; and then b…

Potentially stupid questions: Aren't there efficient techniques to prevent web scraping? And if Google really scrapes web content from them without their permission, wouldn't that be commercial copyright infringement which falls under criminal law? That's the thing I don't understand about the current situation.

> Aren't there efficient techniques to prevent web scraping?

Not especially, since internet browsers make GET requests the same as scrapers. There are techniques around blocking user agents, rate limiting, etc. but that's an arms race against the scrapers.

The tricky part about blocking Google is that if you do, your site won't show up in Google search results. :)

Re: Over 200 newspapers now involved in lawsuits vs. Google, Facebook

#30

Post by wodenokoto »

deadalus wrote: post #28

I HATE clicking on a Google link and discovering that it's paywalled. It's a massive waste of time.

Why is this even allowed by google? It’s a bait and switch similar to serving visitors and search engines different content.
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