Brazilian Newspapers Apparently Don't Want Traffic; They All Opt Out Of Google News
from the how-much-do-they-spend-on-seo? dept
We've already seen newspapers in Belgium and Germany argue that Google needs to pay them for linking to them in Google News. And we just wrote about how French newspapers were looking for the same ridiculous handout. But a bunch of Brazilian newspapers have taken the issue even further, and colluded to all pull out of Google News together (well, 90% of all newspapers in Brazil). They're demanding that Google pay them to link to them. Of course, I'm curious if any of those newspapers has ever hired an SEO expert to try to get them better search rankings...Google, as it does, has pointed out that it sends these newspapers a ton of traffic, which you would think they'd appreciate. A Google representative pointed out how ridiculous the newspapers' stance was:
it would be absurd for a restaurant to tax a cab driver for taking tourists to eat there.In the meantime, if I were one of the 10% of newspapers smart enough not to opt-out, I'd be going all out to try to steal that traffic from the big newspapers.
The newspapers defended their decision by arguing that Google News is "not helping us grow our digital audiences." Instead, they claim that "by providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our web sites." I'm wondering how they determine this, because I can't see how that would possibly be true. Google notes that it sends four billion clicks to news sites each month. The newspaper guys seem to assume that without Google News people will just go straight to their newspaper sites, which is a huge assumption. It also assumes that the people looking at Google News aren't clicking through on news articles. Those both seem like very big assumptions that are likely to be entirely incorrect.
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Filed Under: brazil, business models, google news, newspapers, search traffic, seo, traffic
Companies: google
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Rupert Murdoch tried this
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I do think Brazil is a tad different though, newspapers still have decent revenue from printed stuff. I'd say we are where the US were 10 years ago. I'm not sure why the delay but we are moving towards the same path.
I do think we'll see them reconsidering.
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Boring news?
Is the news so boring that after a few lines they are don't want to read any more than the first couple lines?
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Judge: So what you're saying is, Google copies the entire article?
Newspaper: No, your honor, but the snippet contains enough that people might not want to read the entire story.
Judge: So what you're saying is, you write predictable drivel and any random excerpted piece of it is enough to know the rest?
Newspaper: Derp.
So which is it? Either there is value in Google driving traffic and they just want to be paid for receiving free advertising, or the news sites want to hide that articles can indeed be summarised accurately by Google in 2 sentences.
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The Newspapers Need to Tax Their Readers
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Come on, I'm serious. I'll take bets over this. One week? Two?
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Also, if google provides an opt-out button, why is it a bad thing if it is used?
On another note, what's with all the funny business with the trading of GOOG stock recently.
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In either case, I just don't get the thinking behind this supposed outrage: OMG, Google has us in news links! People might see our articles that way! Fire the torpedos...?
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They will make news by all simultaneously opting out in a news extravaganza and then quietly opt back in so it doesn't make any headlines. Same crap like when the govt puts out an economic report and then quietly revise it so no one notices.
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Or when Romney says one thing and a day later his aides call the media and explain he "misspoke"...
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Here is a link to some pretty charts of the funny biz
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-10-18/google-quotes-resume-687
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Robots.txt
A lot of grief could be avoided if they added googlebot-news to their spider code, then anything allowed for googlebot but not googlebot-news ends up in the regular index on the main Google site, but not on the Google News page.
That way the news sites could opt out of the one without opting out of the other. It would still cost them a significant amount of traffic, I'd bet and cause them to reconsider. On the whole it would a cheap way for Google to prove the point by giving them exactly what they want.
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However, they are not asking to opt-out. They don't even want to opt out. They want Google to pay newspapers for the privilege of sending traffic to newspapers. The simple solution is to not send them traffic, preventing Google from having to pay them.
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The problem with free samples
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I don't actually know, since I don't know how they do it in Brasil.
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Partial credit
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In a similar fashion, without all of the traffic Google provides newspapers, the latter would lose a huge chunk of visitors. If the papers force Google to eliminate them from their search results, they'll surely regret it.
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(Businessweek RSS feed today)
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Vigorish
Of course, content owners have a realistic idea on how much Google earns from GN (not!)
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If a reporter comes to me
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