Journalist Demands Google Give Up Its 'Fair Share' To Newspapers
from the this-again? dept
I have to admit that it's been really kind of sad to watch journalists with little understanding of economics or business flail around blaming the likes of Craigslist and Google (especially Google) for their own failure in building better business models. The latest is a well-written, but poorly thought-out and argued, piece by Peter Osnos, the Vice-Chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, suggesting reasons why Google needs to pay up its "fair share" to newspapers. There are numerous problems with the logic in the piece, but they can be summarized in two basic camps: a misunderstanding of the internet and a misunderstanding of economics.The great thing, by the way, is that the comments on the article highlight pretty much every mistake that Osnos makes -- and, of course, as is oh-so-typical in these situations, Osnos does nothing at all to engage or respond to the comments that call out his mistakes. You want to know why newspapers are failing? It's not because of Google, it's because of this viewpoint that some journalists still hold that they're the masters of the truth, handing it out from on high, wanting nothing at all to do with the riff raff in the comments.
So, what's wrong specifically with the article? Well, he uses as his basis the idea that cable companies (and their subscribers, really) pay TV networks to be carried in cable packages, and suggests that Google should be doing the same thing -- paying newspapers as if they were networks. Of course, there are a few problems there. Television is a broadcast medium with a limit on what can be provided. The economics are entirely different than a communications medium with unlimited "space" for content. Suggesting the two are the same is simply wrong. The economics are entirely different. In one case, you have significant scarcities in terms of what gets "offered." That's not the case with the internet. Ignoring that destroys Osnos' entire argument.
Even more to the point, as one of the commenters to Osnos, Kimota, notes: "It's interesting that cable television was held up as a good example of how to extract subscription fees for content. The American Customer Satisfaction Index from the University of Michigan said in 2007 that cable and satellite TV suffered 'the lowest level of customer satisfaction among all industries covered.'" When your idea of how to save the newspaper business is to take a model mostly beloved by consumers and ask it to mimic a model almost universally hated... that's a problem, right?
The second big problem with Osnos' analysis is that he doesn't appear to understand how Google makes its money. He simply looks at the fact that it's making a ton of money, while newspapers are not, and assumes that Google's actions draw in the money that should have gone to newspapers (hence the "unfairness"). But as Scott Rosenberg notes in the comments again, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Google makes its money, which has little to nothing to do with news, but in targeted advertisements on transactional searches (searches where people are looking to buy something):
Google makes its money mostly from targeted advertising on product searches and other narrow, directed searches. The advertising on news-related searches is not nearly as valuable. Google could remove all newspapers and journalism content from its Web search catalog tomorrow and lose very little of its revenue. The links to news it provides are valuable to its users but not terribly valuable to its advertisers.Finally, Osnos makes another big mistake, common among newspaper folks, that whoever breaks the news is obviously the most valuable source. Yet, as we were just discussing, being first doesn't always mean that you have the most useful information. Related to this, Osnos complains specifically about how Sports Illustrated broke a story, but Google News pointed more people to the Huffington Post coverage of that particular story, stating:
Most galling was that The Huffington Post's use of an Associated Press version of SI's report was initially tops on Google, which meant that it, and not SI.com, tended to be the place readers clicking through to get the gist of the breaking scandal would land.... Why did The Huffington Post come up ahead of SI.com? Because, even Google insiders concede, Huffington is effective at implementing search optimization techniques, which means that its manipulation of keywords, search terms, and the dynamics of Web protocol give it an advantage over others scrambling to be the place readers are sent by search engines. What angered the people at Sports Illustrated and Time Inc. is that Google, acting as traffic conductor, seemed unmoved by their grievance over what had happened to their ownership of the story. An SI editor quoted to me Time Inc's editor-in-chief, John Huey, noting crisply that, "talking to Google is like trying to talk to a television."This, of course, is a gross distortion of reality, and implies totally incorrectly that somehow the Huffington Post has some power over Google that SI.com could not replicate. The fact that Sports Illustrated and other publications have made bad decisions in optimizing their content isn't Google's fault. It's their own fault. Here, let me put this in terms that old "paper" folks might get: If more people go to my store than your store because I put a better ad in the Yellow pages, it's not the fault of the Yellow pages publisher. It's your fault for having a crappy ad. By doing a better job optimizing its content, the Huffington Post effectively better "advertised" itself to Google.
Of course, old school publications like Sports Illustrated could just as easily do the same thing themselves, but they haven't. On top of that, they could offer more useful features and services that attract more people such that they specifically seek out SI's coverage. But, instead, they treat the community the same way Osnos seems to: the riff raff can comment, but they aren't a part of the "real conversation" that occurs outside of the community.
Osnos wants fairness, but the system is amazingly fair. Much more fair than it ever was in the past, in fact. The problem isn't about "fairness." It's about Osnos being upset that in a level playing field pretty much everyone but the newspapers have figured out how to play the game better. What's fair is that the newspapers haven't been able to adjust and their revenue and readership is reflecting that.
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Filed Under: economics, fair share, fair use, journalism, peter osnos
Companies: google
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Basically, if Google wants to use AP sourced material, they should pay in the same manner that newspapers do to use that material. The internet doesn't make them special.
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Google sends me to dozens of news sites around the country & the world. Each one of them has a unique opportunity to attract me into their community. Instead, your scenario would have every person go to their local or favorite news site, because I don't live in San Fran, so I never would have thought to go to sfgate to get news ... it'd be all DenverPost all the time ... and my life and perspective of the world would be remiss for it because of a lack of heterogeneous view points. I would probably go back to not bothering with the news at all ...
So, I don't see how Google would hurt from losing news, but I can see how smaller news sites would suffer a drop in traffic ... though seeing as how they are totally clueless on how to do anything with the traffic they get, I'm sure none of them would notice.
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So the concept of "what can you make from free?" = a business. I guess people don't understand that many industries can be expanded through efficiencies like this. I suspect that more news is watched since google began aggregating than before that, for certain. Likewise pre-internet and pre-tv and pre-radio.
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Yet, people spend MORE TIME washing clothes now than they did a hundred years ago.
Because a hundred years ago, it was so much work and effort to wash clothes, that people simply wore their clothes dirty for longer periods of time until someone (mom!) finally went down to the river. So, saving time and effort has actually let to an INCREASE in time and effort, but also everyone wears clean(er) clothes most of the time.
I read more news from more sources now, since it's so easy to find news that I'm interested in. And since I don't have to be locked into a limited local supply that may or may not be able to meet my needs, I can get the same story from a number of different perspectives from around the world. So, I spend MORE time reading MORE news from MORE places.
And yet, they can't seem to figure out what to do with all this. Google is delivering me to these news sites. It's their failure to turn me into money ... Google just showed me who had the information I was looking for.
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Then we should make sure that AP paid for the content as well, and we've already established that they quite often forget to do so or even better, think that free stuff for them is fair and free stuff to others is not.
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Google already established that they don't care if newspapers show up on their search engines. If the newspapers don't want to show up on their search engines all they have to do is opt out. They have two options
Option one: use a robots.txt file. They refused to do so (so arguing such a file doesn't always work with no evidence to support such a claim is useless).
Option two: ask google to remove them. I'm sure google will be more than glad to remove them upon request, as they have already indicated that they don't mind removing them if asked to by a robots.txt file.
But you can't FORCE someone to use your service and then force them to pay for it. That's extortion.
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Google already pays to host AP articles on the ap.google.com news portion. No one is contesting that on either side of the debate.
These morons want Google to pay just to link to people.
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The same place news comes from now. People who do things that are worth talking about.
Newspapers don't make content. They write about other people doing interesting things. There will always be people willing to write about other people doing interesting things ...
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2) The content is already free. Why anyone would pay for a newspaper nowadays is beyond me.
3) So when newspapers stop running, time suddenly freezes and nothing happens?
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by beancounters from conglomerates that don't give a d*mn
about journalism. They are like A&R men that over-exploit
a musical genre until "death before disco" is a rallying
cry. Newspapers first need to sort out their own primary
reason for existing before fixating on anything else.
There is no threat that Google will prevent the emergence
of the next "Woodward & Bernstein" since the corporatization
of news has already done that.
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I refuse to sit back and consume the news that traditional media push towards us. I want to interact with news that I'm interested in.
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You seem to misunderstand the problem. Google is NOT presenting this information as their own like a Newspaper does. They have an aggregator that gives a brief synopsis and links back to the AP story. It is essentially free advertisement for the original story.
Google's bots do not read the content they grab. They just grab anything that doesn't tell them no. As in the wonderful blog post by Google's PR department and thousands of tech savvy web masters have been saying since day one of these complaints, the AP has one real option that has been part of the Internet for decades:
robots.txt
This file will prevent them from being scraped by Google. Unless you are saying that its "unfair" for the AP not to show up in search results by Google. In which case your hippocracy is staggering, as the AP should then be paying Google for driving traffic to them.
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Using what? A divining rod?
Without google, the only option is other search engines or aggregators, i.e. others that do what google does, but with less market share.
Further, your assertion that it wouldn't hurt the news sources is ridiciulous. As pointed out in previous stories, newspapers are welcome to block google and other engines via robots.txt if they think they're getting a bum deal. So why aren't they blocking the googles of the world?
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Umm well.
I think newspapers are just missing the boat by not monetizing the traffic properly. They are stuck in the "display ad" idea of making money and they make some. They all have the technology to see what search query brought people to their site. They could easily turn those search queries into money on their site by using google's ad tools.
Oh never mind...talking to them is useless.
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no links
m3mnoch.
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On the other hand, Osnos say: "Proceeds go instead to those who sell advertising and other services while aggregating and/or lifting material they did not create". Newspapers have always been an ad supported service, so I don't really see the difference.
BTW, my nick is a play on the word "bear" in spanish. I didn't know about this Osnos guy until today.
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This is why our economy sucks
"It's not right for Google to be such a success, they need to pay for us! they can afford it!"
"It's not right for rich people to be able to keep their money! They need to pay their fair share!"
"It's not right for oil companies to make money selling an essential product to Americans! We need to seize their profits!"
We need to remove the government from our economy and limit it to only protecting our rights to life, liberty, and private property. This would protect against theft, fraud, breach of contract, etc, and would allow our economy to work the way it is supposed to: work hard, earn rewards. Right now our government works like this: buy a politician, receive stolen money.
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Re: This is why our economy sucks
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Kind of surprised...
Newspapers, magazines and other sources of information remain useful, and potentially valuable, to Google. Google provides increased chances for customers to find those sources of information rather than a siphon for money that "would" have gone to the magazine, newspaper, etc., just like 3 x 5 cards lead you to a reference, but take nothing away from the reference. Realign your reality.
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Re: Kind of surprised...
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HuffPo is an AP licensee
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From the orginal
That sounds like the music industry and publishing industry, they made fortunes while the writers and musicians (creators) got scraps.
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trackrights, instead?
.
i understand copyright is dead in a digital society, but I'd appreciate if I can keep track of visitors of my own content. google keeps this metadata (central to its business model), but it doesn't share. that's unfair.
.
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Re: trackrights, instead?
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Anonymous from yesterday outed?
Yesterday the anonymous post was calling for transparency in Google's search engine, specifically in regards to SEO. It seems like the anger expressed by SI.com is because HuffingtonPost beat them out of the traffic generated by their 'scoop' because Huffington had better SEO.
I think it would be fair to say that SI.com could fit into the category of a large internet site.
Anyone else thinking these stories are related? How about some "amatuers" do some investigative journalism and track down a link?
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Re: Anonymous from yesterday outed?
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All these industries are just struggling with the concept of reduced scarcity and inefficiency. If you start at the beginning, there is no economy or system of bartering. Unfortunately, we do not have infinite resources for everybody, which would be a good thing as everybody would get what they wanted for free; since there are significant costs associated with obtaining any one resource, however, various entities are forced to focus on a single resource and then trade that for currency to buy other resources from other providers.
With internet communication, digital file sharing, open source collaboration, etc. there is far less inefficiency than there used to be. The industries that made a bundle in the past are going to make less with their old models because certain elements of their service--or the entire service, if they're unlucky--no longer contain the same inherent barriers to entry, either because they are cheaper and easier to provide, or flat out infinitely available as in the case of sharing media.
This is a good thing; we are eliminating the very thing that necessitated paying somebody else to provide services for us in the first place. Somewhere along the way, though, a lot of us forgot that the economy does not exist to provide people with money, but to provide individual citizens with the necessary goods and services as cheaply and efficiently as possible. By constructing articial barriers to communication, reproduction, and distribution of news, music, software, etc. we are fighting against the very thing that a currency system serves to provide.
This is not a matter of protecting private property; an individual instance of a news article no more belongs to the author than does the memory of the article in a man's head whom has read it. A copy of a song is no more the property of the musician that sang it than is the sound of a man whistling its tune as he replays it in his mind. We have unfortunately defined intellectual property in ways counterintuitive to our original concept of 'property'--that which requires a marginal effort and/or exclusivity to obtain and keep.
The only scarcity within is the artisitic creativity and overhead to construct the original work. This is not being infringed upon by sharing it; rather, it brings attention and awareness to the public of its existence, allowing the artist to leverage that into other means of compensation for his generosity to share. In many cases, fame and recognition are sufficient motivation in themselves, but the abundance of individuality in the world crossed with the small to nonexistant cost of distribution means that we will have no shortage of creators willing to produce and share in the future. However, society has no obligation to provide them with a living since the individual fruits of their labor no longer reduce the scarcity or cost to us in obtaining objects of their nature.
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save the trees don't buy a paper everyday google everyday
good n plenty.
let's put this in perspective for a moment.
i met the daughter of my next door neighbor the other
day for the first time. while rattling off at supersonic
speed her bio and how she missed her home town, she was
texting someone that she just met a guy and was meeting him
for the first time and she still had time to google map
the location of her next meeting. newspapers ? you gotta
be kidding........who has time to read the rags anymore?
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Google should remove papers, let them opt-in to the index
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Re: Google should remove papers, let them opt-in to the index
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Example:
http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=ca&hl=en&q=airline
Now, this page may or may not have any ads on it when you view it, but the potential is there (it's in the format). Thus, Google rather than just giving links to news sites, actually presents the news. In today's headline oriented news world, this page might be enough to satisfy people. Example:
http://news.google.com/news?um=1&ned=ca&hl=en&q=djia
If I wanted the DJIA close for today, I could get that info and never leave the page, effectively making Google my news source, and not the business news site they lifted the data from.
Basically, the newspapers should be able to be indexed (as searchable in normal search) without be sorted out into newspapers and displayed differently. Newspapers and news sources should be asked to opt into the extra service (the news sorting) which may not be to their liking.
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Google exists solely because people cannot go from "A" to "C". You're trying to argue that if Google didn't exist, people would go straight to the news. Guess what: the only people who go through Google are the ones that CAN'T go straight to the news.
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Re: Brilliant!!
Of course, then we'd need something to find stuff. Like a "finding engine".
And you know what would be handy? A tool to pull together info from all the different sites so you don't have to check each one...
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Fair share
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Free Market Research
Here's some free market research (on the Internet, for anyone to read!):
* People want what they want, when and where they want it
And it follows that:
* People will pay more, or put up with some inconvenience if overall it appears that they are getting more of what they want, when and where they want it.
* people are smart enough to know when it is technologically possible for them to read/watch/listen to what they want, right here, right now and get REALLY annoyed by anything that gets in the way.
example: I would pay someone a fair bit more for an ice-cream cone if they were standing by my desk with a waffle cone with a couple of scoops of coffee ice cream, right now. I might also be willing to put up with a brief advertisement AND pay (more) money for it. It all depends how it compares (to me) to the walk/drive that would be necessary to get that ice cream cone that I want right here, right now.
At least with ice cream, I know it is not technologically feasible to have someone standing by with a waffle cone machine and a freezer full of all possible ice cream flavors unless I decide to work at an ice cream store. So I certainly don't turn to forcing someone to stand by with ice cream for me - that would be crazy!
But it sure is easy, and it doesn't seem to hurt anyone much if I go read a copy of a paywalled-off NYT article on Scribed. That I was completely willing to pay for! Or watch ads for. I just have no WAY to pay for it. micropayments? trying my luck at the newsstand at the end of the day?
This plays out quite simply when it comes to content:
* people want to read/watch/listen to what they want to read/watch/listen to right here, right now.
* they get annoyed when it is technologically possible (beyond possible - CHEAP and EASY). Annoyed enough to do copyright infringement en-masse.
Technology has been agressively working to provide this, and on the whole as people buy technology, they select technology that enables this.
It can be wildly more bandwidth efficient to broadcast:
* putting the identical newspaper on every doorstep
* broadcasting the same content over the airwaves or cable
But that doesn't get people what they want very effectively. So tech has evolved steadily away from broadcast and all the signs indicate that it will continue to do so in spite of any efforts to stop it.
The market winners will be the content creators that most effectively provide customers what they want, when and where they want it AND figure out a way to monetize it - by making more money from the customer than it costs to create the content.
Hence:
* mp3 players win out over CDs - even though the sound quality is lower, people would FAR rather have a huge selection with them wherever they are than have higher quality. This way they can listen to what they want, when and where they want it.
* cell phones with mp3 capability win out over standalone mp3 players. Because people want to be able to talk to who they want, when and where they want AND listen to the music they want when and where they want. Even though there are additional usability sacrifices by combining functions!
* delivery of media over the Internet (audio, video and written) wins over broadcast (newspaper, bulk shipment of CDs to your local store, TV) - particularly because now the Internet means access to it wherever you have one of:
* broadband
* access to a broadband connection via wifi
* pseudo-broadband via the cell network
and the pathways to broadband anywhere, any time are constantly increasing.
The articles example of Cable TV actually does highlight a possible business model. It chafes customers to pay 77c/month for Fox news when they don't watch it. But at least that cost is relatively small, and they don't have to watch the commercials between Fox News when they don't watch it. I actually seriously doubt that 77c/month is the source of the great dissatisfaction with the cable industry. Perhaps all of the other channels that a given customer doesn't care about added together are.
However, I think points to a possible business model for these newspapers.
If we accept that micropayments don't work - and we have yet to see a model that does work, that leaves content subscriptions and advertising (so far). Would customers be willing to pay say $10/month for access to ALL professional news via their media of choice (additional fees for paper obviously)? Then they'd be paying fractions of cents for all those articles they don't care about, but the $10/month would be worthwhile for the few that they do care about. And as long as they could get them when and where they want with minimal hassle. Maybe. And if the getting it when/where they want was easy enough, they'd probably even put up with some ads.
I think it has been proven quite solidly at this point though, that customers are NOT willing to pay a subscription fee for access to just a single publication though. It is just too much of a hassle. What happens when the customer has a subscription to WSJ and notices an article from NYT that they really want to read? They can't micropay for it. Heck - even if they discover it, and try to revert to the broadcast model (newsstand) they might be out of luck by the time they get there. They sure don't want to subscribe for a month (online) just to get that one article. But there's not technology reason they couldn't 'just see' that article - it's trivial to host a copy online.
But that WOULD require those professional content creators to THINK about their business model, and make a serious modification to it. For example cooperation across the entire industry. That's pretty radical innovation.
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Re: Free Market Research
Frankly, I think cooperation among certain rivals would just lead to the downfall of both as somebody else came along to compete. The great thing about competition, and about the new era of internet communication and collaboration, is that the overhead needed to create a great news service is much, much smaller. I think advertising and access to the audience is the key as opposed to a paywall, and the providers that allow the greatest access and hold down their costs are the ones that will succeed the best.
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"talking to Google is like trying to talk to a television"
Not that they needed to talk to Google in this case but
Google really sucks at responding to anyone for any reason.
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Newspapers are between biz models
Speaking as a journalist, it was a marvelous time when we got to tell people what the news was, what time people would get it, in what form. But we are between business models. The absolutely amazing 20th century process of putting out a daily newspaper -- and it is remarkable that it happens each and every day... the news gathering, putting it together, printing it and distributing it to a wide region -- is amazing. But times have changed.
I agree -- most publications don't want to have to deal with comments -- even on their own pages. They see bloggers as outsiders. They still have the notion that they have control.
If I have a concern, it is who will do the big investigative stories -- the stories like the still remarkable series the WP did on Walter Reed and the treatment of vets? Who is going to cover the war in Iraq? It simply does take unique skills -- and money. We'll always know everything there is to know about Michael Jackson, but who will cover the stories that really make a difference in our lives? That question is still unanswered.
That being said, I know we'll figure it all out. But as journalists and publishers, it wastes time wishing that this Internet thing wasn't around. It is... and it isn't going away. It is a new era. Stop blaming Google -- or anybody else -- and let's figure out a new business model.
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Internet Bites Obsolete Journalist
Value to the users is exactly what drives questors to search engines. Old-News would do well to drop the long-dead concept of reader ownership that came from the 'one or two newspapers per market monopoly' era that preceeded the 1980s.
People have choices these days, and those who want to be informed exercise those choices. If newspapers want to increase their ad-revenue share in the open market of ideas, they might consider diversifying their content- especially in idealogical slant. Offering a more diverse, well crafted product line creates value. And it is value that newspapers, and many journalists, like this Osnos guy in TFA, fail to deliver in measurable amounts compared to what else is available.
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Um, if this is one of this guy's arguments, that's pretty retarded. I hadn't thought about it that way, but he's got a really good point. The news sites SHOULD be paying Google to be carried in their "network package".
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