It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google
blog.nillium.com
It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google
#2> The news industry as a whole needs to come together and demand to be fairly compensated for their contributions.
Society as a whole needs to come together and demand an end to monopoly compensation for shoddy work. End imaginary property laws.
Re: It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google
#3You should just incentivize publishers to use Substack, which actually has the backing and has a good option (publishers can choose to publish for free or by inducing for-profit viewership) and writers don't have to pay. This is a much better option than another no-name entity.
Re: It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google
#4> For too long, journalists have given away their stories for free in exchange for distribution by the duopoly.
The news industry does not "give" their stories to Facebook or Google. It allows the placement of links to the stories on those sites. (I use the term "allow" loosely, since in many jurisdictions they do not have the right to restrict in-linking.)
The news industry is free to try to prevent in-linking. The technical capability already exists in the form of robots.txt and the referer header. Although I can tell you right now what will happen. People will read less news, and read more of other stuff that is still distributed on Facebook or Google. They won't stop using Facebook or Google.
Honestly, it would probably be better for the world. People are reading too much news and it is contributing to polarization. Won't help the news industry's bottom line, though. Won't hurt Google or Facebook's.
Re: It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google
#5Forget Facebook, I won’t defend it.
But I don’t see how google removes revenue from news agencies. They are free to put up pay walls and get deindexed. Or do the hybrid paywall thing that nyt and wsj does where they show up in the searches but people have to login/pay.
The problem is newspapers haven’t figured out how to make people pay online. This isn’t a google problem. It might be a Facebook opportunity/problem though.
From my perspective as a news consumer, the modern newspapers online are too expensive by far. I have a wsj article I want to read. But I’d have to buy a (no doubt hard to cancel) subscription to view it. Ditto the economist - they’re the worst I had a sub and I didn’t want to call them and deal with their hard sell desubscribe, so I had my credit card block them.
If this was the real world, and I saw that interesting wsj article, I’d fork over my $0.25 or $0.50 or whatever for the issue and walk away with it. Rather than entering a lifetime data relationship with some entity that wants to exploit me for more money.
That’s why people don’t pay for news: you can’t on a casual basis.
Re: It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google
#6Legislative force in Australia is driving this change. The government is at odds with public broadcasters. Initially they excluded them from receiving revenue from linkage. They backtracked, but I fear for the consequence: I believe they will use this to introduce cost saving de-funding of public broadcasting.
Its "be careful what you wish for" stuff.
Also, we have a fight with a union-pension-fund backed news outlet being possibly responsible for (same government) legislative changes to prevent pension funds from investing in news (one word change to require their spend to be for members financial benefit, not just "members benefit" which permitted this investment)
Also Also we have huge dominance of print media and non-public news outlet by "News Ltd" which is Rupert Murdoch which is a cancer on the world of disinterested, bipartisan news (the leader writers and editorial panel of News in Australia are futher to the right than the Koch brothers, and have gone feral on anything even vaguely to the left of Reaganite views of pollution, green energy, public sector finance...) -The pay for links thing, is designed to get money to News Ltd which has suffered massive declines in revenue.
News hoovered up all the small independent newspapers in Australia. Its a public disgrace, of equal dimensions to the predation of news by Google and the Facebooks of the globe.
Re: It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google
#7> The news industry as a whole needs to come together and demand to be fairly compensated for their contributions. Society as a whole needs to come together and demand an end to monopoly compensation for shoddy work. End imaginary property laws.
How about don't buy shoddy work as a solution?
Re: It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google
#8You should just incentivize publishers to use Substack, which actually has the backing and has a good option (publishers can choose to publish for free or by inducing for-profit viewership) and writers don't have to pay. This is a much better option than another no-name entity.
I don't think that replacing one centralized rentseeking publisher with a different one is an improvement.
We need better distribution models, not different bosses.
Re: It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google
#9Facebook and Google provide more of a benefit to individual news organizations than vice versa. If everyone uses FB / Google already, you’re not doing them a favor by posting your content to those platforms, they’re doing you a favor by allowing more eyes to see the content. Of course in aggregate if all news publishers stopped publishing content then maybe less people would use FB / Google, which could harm them.
Ben Thompson explains more about this in an article here: https://stratechery.com/2020/media-regulators-and-big-tech-i...
Re: It’s time to remove news from Facebook and Google
#10You should just incentivize publishers to use Substack, which actually has the backing and has a good option (publishers can choose to publish for free or by inducing for-profit viewership) and writers don't have to pay. This is a much better option than another no-name entity.
We don’t need a thousand damned subscriptions each trying to kill us from the death of a thousand paper cuts. There’s no future for sub space.
I want to toss down my quarter and move on without leaving my data and email address for someone to milk.