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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

#91

Post by lern_too_spel »

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.

Apple News is awful. Worse, you can't uninstall it on MacOS. Since when is it OK for machines built for professionals like the MacBook Pro to come with crapware, let alone uninstallable crapware?

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

#93

Post by niftich »

mailslot wrote: post #6

Local 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…

Google's answer to this is a trifecta of AMP [1], Contributor [2], and Funding Choices [3] -- to deliver content signed by the publisher [4] from Google's CDN and display less-annoying ads in the meantime, or purchase an ad-free pass to the publisher through Google.

This venture is predicated on the assumption that Google and the publishers both need each other: publishers want revenue from ads, revenue whose amount is proportional to the number of viewers, while Google wants quality destinations to which it can direct traffic and/or quality sources of content which it can display in a captive newsreader.

This is a reality in a world where paid newspaper subscriptions are down, media makes money with just-in-time auctioned online display ads, and paywalls interfere with the positive effects of wide distribution, like the likelihood of new customer acquisition.

[1] https://www.ampproject.org/ [2] https://contributor.google.com/ [3] https://fundingchoices.google.com [4] https://github.com/WICG/webpackage

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

#94

Post by merlincorey »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #64
wbl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because you can publish it yourself. We don't need giant middlemen to use the Internet.

Are you planning to run your own T1 lines to the backbone when you're building your own datacenter to host one video? We don't "need" them, sure, but we live in a society. We're supposed to be able to delegate work to others who specialize in doing it.

T1 lines provide a scant 1.544 Mbps of bandwidth.

No one is doing any amount of video over T1 lines in 2018.

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

#95

Post by jasode »

sigstoat wrote: post #73
notatoad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most people do need middlemen though. if you require everybody to host their own content on their own websites, you go back to the old days of the internet where the only content was published by nerds. which had a certain charm, but was a lot smaller and less inclusive than today's internet.

it could be even easier than it was. there's no reason someone couldn't make a small bit of desktop software which, fed AWS/Azure/GCP/DO/github pages/etc credentials, set up every aspect of a website, and automatically synced some local directory of content to the relevant site.

>there's no reason someone couldn't make a small bit of desktop software which, fed AWS/Azure/GCP/DO/

The gp (notatoad) mentioned technical skill as a barrier and you responded to that point but easy-to-use idiot-proof software isn't really the issue.

The bigger problem(s) mega-sites like Youtube solves is financial.

When one uploads a video to Youtube, it doesn't matter if it gets 0 views or 1 billion views. The cost is the same to the uploader: $0. Hosting it on one's own with AWS/Azure/GCP/DigitalOcean/etc will have variable egress costs and budgeting/forecasting a potential expense of thousands of dollars is not something regular people want to tackle. (The difficulty of this should be apparent from the stories of sophisticated tech geeks getting blindsided by unexpected AWS bandwidth bills.) The other option of placing a bandwidth limit to cap the costs means you create a different problem: a popular video will result in web surfers seeing annoying "bandwidth exceeded" error messages.

Another financial problem Youtube addresses is monetization. Hosting it on a self-managed cloud means less opportunities for ad revenue. Yes, a lot of HN despise ads but many uploaders of desirable video content like the ad payouts.

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

#96

Post by ForHackernews »

cronix wrote: post #82
ForHackernews wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don't we just make Google give every news org a few million a year then? That sounds sensible enough to me. As an example, Canada taxed blank CDs and CDR drives and distributed the revenue to their music industry.

Interesting, I hadn't heard of that. They assume people only store audio on cds? So individuals/companies that were storing data on cd's were supporting the music industry?

https://torrentfreak.com/canada-increases-music-industry-sub...

I'm not Canadian so I don't know the details, but it doesn't seem like a terrible model to me.

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

#97

Post by sdenton4 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #72
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…

> Are we going back to the point where only a handful of content producers exist and everybody else should be content just consuming it? YouTube could just block non-local content to users in the EU and charge content providers in the EU an upload fee. The upload fee could be made low enough so as to not be intrusitive (or incubate competition) but high enough to cover a good fraction of the additional costs.

But I don't think it's a problem solvable by more money... The upload fee would just funnel to legal costs, since no one has anything better than content id, and europe is saying that content id isn't good enough.

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

#98

Post by AnssiH »

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.

I will be extremely surprised if that will be required from small companies, considering the directive expressly says that "special account shall be taken of [...] ensuring that the burden on SMEs remains appropriate and that automated blocking of content is avoided."

(SME = Small and medium-sized enterprises)

There is also no language saying that pre-screening is required, only that "online content sharing service providers and right holders shall cooperate in good faith in order to ensure that unauthorised protected works or other subject matter are not available on their services", which could, IMO, be satisfied by a DMCA-style complaints process.

> The second point has been missed by most criticism of the Copyright Directive, and to me it's the biggest problem of all.

IMO trying to fix the false positive issue is the best part of the directive, as it requires access to human review, reasonably justified decisions, and it requires users to have access to an independent body for the resolution of disputes. This would be a big improvement over the current Youtube system.

(source PDF: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//... )

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

#99

Post by megaman8 »

Seems it's much easier to get some legislation passed than actually fix your business model. Everytime I come across an interesting news article and want to make a 10c donation, there's never an easy micropayment way to do it. Furthermore places like the wall street journal block their content and ask you to pay hundreds of dollars. I'm not going to pay hundreds of dollars just so I can speed-read a single article for 60 seconds.

Come on, media industry, get with the times and understand your target customer.

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

#100

Post by dmitrygr »

AnssiH wrote: post #98
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. I will be extremely surprised if that will be required from small companies, considering the directive expressly says that "special account shall be taken of [...] ensuring that the burden on SMEs remains appropriate and that automated blocking of content is avoided." (SME = Small and medium-sized enterprises) There is also no langu…

and i am sure the properly-greased hand will ascertain that the right businesses get classified as "SME" and the wrong ones do not ;)
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