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The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

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Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#41

Post by vorpalhex »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #12

"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…

Yes, I use aggregators so I don't fall victim (as easily) to echochambers of my own design. All sources are biased, but at least you can hopefully get some idea of the truth by reading differently biased sources.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#42

Post by Blackthorn »

reaperducer wrote: post #30
vesinisa wrote: post #27

The 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.

This was addressed in the article. The shares of other sources are down, and the shares of Google sources are steady or rising.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#44

Post by vorpalhex »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #23
zzzcpan wrote: post #19

> 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 regulat…

> It's very possible that only government regulation which forces participation (such as the link tax) can actually work.

Why don't we just make Google give every news org a few million a year then? Why pretend it's anything else but Google directly paying for the news?

Side point, if news subscriptions were reasonably priced (upfront pricing, and billed monthly instead of this odd weekly nonsense), they would probably not care at all about Google.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#45

Post by vesinisa »

reaperducer wrote: post #30
vesinisa wrote: post #27

The 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.

Far more important is the search traffic I'd guess, but it will obviously go dark in concert with Google News.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#46

Post by ben_w »

IanCal wrote: post #34
paol wrote: post #9

I'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…

> 1) Implementing youtube-style content id will be a huge burden for small companies. There's stuff in every version I've read about the measures required being different due to size so I don't really follow the point here. And people on the other end (the uploaders) must have recourse, there's a mandated appeals process unlike the current situation.

That’s good info about #1, because it seems to be an O(n * m) problem where n is number of existing copyrighted works and m is the number of uploads.

I’m more concerned about the way copyright itself may need to change to work sensibly with this — according to several UK lawyers I’ve talked to, under UK law any work is copyrighted the moment it is put down in a fixed medium. For example, this comment, the moment it is recorded to any database or cache. It is not a sensible rule as-written, and common law saying “now now, don’t be silly” is the only reason things are not already out of hand. Unfortunately most of the EU isn’t common law and one of the few countries which is is the one which is about to leave. It might be fine, but I can’t tell. I only speak English, mediocre German, and tourist/subtourist French and Greek.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#47

Post by Kalium »

jopsen wrote: post #40
whatshisface wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eventually, people will have to run ads on their own websites, the same as before Youtube. There will be a lot less video content because serving video is a tough thing.

I'm sure there are cloud providers out there offering this rather cheap... And it's only going to be cheaper in the future :)

You're absolutely right! It's certainly going to become cheaper and easier to host video!

With that said, is it perhaps possible that the problems publishers of content struggle with are in the main not those of the nuts and bolts of publishing? Perhaps, even, that these problems (content discovery, gaining access to users, analytics, ad management) might be well-addressed by platforms?

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#48

Post by eiaoa »

vorpalhex wrote: post #41
Kurtz79 wrote: post #12

"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…

Yes, I use aggregators so I don't fall victim (as easily) to echochambers of my own design. All sources are biased, but at least you can hopefully get some idea of the truth by reading differently biased sources.

> Yes, I use aggregators so I don't fall victim (as easily) to echochambers of my own design. All sources are biased, but at least you can hopefully get some idea of the truth by reading differently biased sources.

I'm not sure if that makes sense as a strategy. By relying on aggregators (that aren't human curated like Apple News), you're just getting the sources that do the best SEO. If your aggregator does algorithmic curation, they'll build an echo chamber for you.

I think if you want to avoid falling into an echo chamber, it's best to identify a couple of high-quality news sources with different perspectives, and read them unselectively. Say two national newspapers with different political orientations, an international newspaper, and a local newspaper.

Re: The Media Industry and the “Make-Google-Pay” Fantasy

#50

Post by milesskorpen »

paol wrote: post #9

I'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…

I'd hope (?) that one outcome is 3rd party sass companies which are willing to do this screening (ala Sift Science) and potentially even insure to handle the risk (ala Climate Corp, which offers farmers insurance based on the outcomes of its models). If the EU has these laws, this could be a solid business model.
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