Is Google Regretting Paying Off Belgian And French Newspapers Yet? Other Newspapers Demand Their Cut

from the like-that-wasn't-predictable dept

For years now, we've talked about how various newspapers (and local governments) around the globe were arguing that Google News was somehow unfairly cheating them out of revenues (even as they sent a ton of traffic to those sites, often to visitors who wouldn't have visited the pages at all otherwise). Back in December, we saw that Google "settled" a long running dispute with Belgian newspapers, with part of it being an "agreement" to buy a bunch of advertising to effectively pay off the newspapers. Then, in February, Google did a similar deal in France, this time to the tune of $82 million. Of course, it didn't take long for people to point out that this sets an awful precedent for the internet, as these legacy publishers now believe they have a legitimate argument that sites should pay to link to them.

And, of course, newspapers in lots of other countries were paying attention. While Google has insisted that those two deals "won't be replicated" elsewhere in Europe, it appears that newspaper publishers elsewhere in Europe would like to test that claim. Media companies in Portugal are first up to the plate, demanding that Google pay up:

"Our position is that the content has to be paid for ... We showed that our focus is to be paid for Google News using our news," he said, adding that the two sides planned to continue regular meetings.

A Google spokeswoman said the company "does not comment on private meetings held by its teams".

Maybe, next time, Google should stand up for its principles on deals like this, even in the face of political pressure. Because giving in and paying up only means that pretty much every country with a struggling media business (meaning, most countries) is going to come calling before too long...

Filed Under: belgium, france, google news, newspapers, portugal

Belgian Newspapers Agree To Drop Lawsuit Over Google News After Google Promises To Show Them How To Make Money Online

from the baby-steps dept

As we've been reporting, there's been a movement underway in many countries to argue that something like Google News -- which displays headlines, brief snippets and links to full news stories on newspapers' own websites -- somehow violates newspaper copyrights. This makes no sense logically, especially given just how much those same sites likely spend on "search engine optimization" to try to get better ranked in search engines. The only explanation for it that makes sense is the most obvious one: the newspapers are struggling to find ways to make money these days, and they see that Google is making a lot. Hence: come up with a plan to force Google to fork over some of that revenue. Of course, the very first to do this -- years before Germany and France and others got into the game -- was a group of Belgian newspapers who sued Google for sending them traffic. Amazingly, a local court agreed with the newspapers and told Google to pay up. Following this, Google removed those newspapers from its index, leading the newspapers to freak out and demand to be put back in.

The somewhat acrimonious legal dispute continued, until now. Google has announced that the news publishers have agreed to a "settlement," where the terms are somewhat hilarious. Basically, it looks like they've agreed to drop the lawsuit... if Google will teach them how to make money online:

• Promote both the publishers’ and Google’s services - Google will advertise its services on the publishers’ media, while the publishers will optimise their use of Google’s advertising solutions, in particular AdWords to attract new readers.
• Increase publishers’ revenue - by collaborating on making money with content, both via premium models (paywalls, subscriptions), and via advertising solutions such as the AdSense platform and the AdExchange marketplace;
• Increase reader engagement - by implementing Google+ social tools, including video Hangouts, on news sites, and launching official YouTube channels;
• Increase the accessibility of the publishers’ content - by collaborating on the distribution of the publishers original content on mobile platforms, in particular smartphones and tablets;

It's good to see the whole thing settled, but, really, the settlement itself seems somewhat silly. Google's agreement to buy advertising with those publishers is the "payoff" bit (apparently to the tune of approximately $6 million -- and which allows both sides to claim "victory"), but the focus on effectively teaching the publishers how to "do internet stuff" just shows how ridiculous the original lawsuit was in the first place.

Filed Under: advertising, belgium, copyright, google news, internet
Companies: google

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.

Filed Under: brazil, business models, google news, newspapers, search traffic, seo, traffic
Companies: google

Proposed Licensing For Newspaper Snippets Could Threaten Users Of Blogs, Facebook And Twitter In Germany

from the triumph-of-the-dinosaurs dept

A few months ago we wrote about a really bad idea that was being floated in Germany: making companies like Google pay for the use of news snippets in services such as Google News. Unfortunately, that idea has now been turned into a concrete proposal for a new law; remarkably, it is even worse than the original plans.

As Udo Vetter points out in a post entitled "Digitally Castrated" (German original), the emphasis of the proposed modification to German copyright law (available as pdf) has shifted: now the primary targets of the law are not only companies like Google, but also ordinary people who blog or post short excerpts of news stories on Facebook or even Twitter, who may be required to obtain a special new license to do so.

Vetter suggests this is because the German publishers have realised that Google would probably rather close down its Google News site in Germany than pay for each snippet, and so they have decided to go after an Internet group who make up in numbers what they lack in revenue: German users of blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

They are likely to be affected because two aspects of the proposed law are vague. It would apparently apply to anyone who makes money from their online writing, and that seems to include things like a few Google Ads or a micropayment system like Flattr. The other uncertainty is what exactly is allowed in the way of unlicensed excerpts from articles. The proposal explicitly mentions that quotations that are currently legal will remain legal. But as Vetter points out, a recent German court decision established that even very short excerpts could be infringing, which effectively guts that apparent safeguard.

This creates a gray area of what will be lawful for ordinary Internet users. And that, in its turn, will create an opportunity for publishers to send out huge numbers of threatening letters to bloggers and others that have quoted from newspapers and magazines. Since few of the latter will have the resources to defend themselves in court, most will simply give in and pay for one of the new licenses the legislation would create.

This will doubtless have a chilling effect on German blogging, and by extension on the use of quotations from newspapers in German Facebook posts and on Twitter too, since users will hardly be keen to fight major battles against well-funded publishers to establish the exact contours of the new law.

The end-result could be a disaster for German blogging, microblogging and social networks. Freedom of speech would inevitably suffer, as people hesitate to challenge articles published in newspapers and magazines for fear of running afoul of the new rules. Old media will be back in the driver's seat -- exactly as the publishers doubtless planned when they lobbied for this law.

One hope is that the extreme nature of this proposal will shock enough people into protesting against it -- the massive street demonstrations against ACTA showed what the German Internet community is capable of. The other is that, if the worst comes to the worst, and it is passed in its current form, the new copyright law would surely alienate so many users of popular platforms like blogs and social networks that the German Pirate party would find itself propelled to even greater political power.

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Filed Under: germany, google news, licensing, newspapers
Companies: facebook, flattr, google, twitter

While Newspapers Threaten To Ban Google News, This Journalist Begs To Get In

from the not-your-site dept

Lately, it seems that most media outlets are up in arms over Google and other news aggregators using their content. So, it's somewhat ironic to hear veteran journalist, Robert X. Cringely, complain that he has wanted to be included on Google News for years, but has had a hell of a time getting listed. He goes as far as to claim that he is on a "blacklist" of news sources that are denied from Google News. While this may seem like an exciting and interesting conspiracy theory, I'd have to wonder if Occam's razor applies here. Most likely, the Google News product managers have made some sort of algorithmic decision figure into whether or not a site is included in Google News, and simply put, Cringely.com did not fit the bill. No harm or ill will need be implied. Actually, after looking at Google News' technical requirements, it appears that Cringely's site does not meet Google's requirements of a numeric URL or news site map -- so, perhaps the first step would be to satisfy those requirements.

That said, while Cringely does run an excellent site, he gives no reason why he should feel entitled to be included in Google News. After all, Google is incentivized to create the best news product that they can reasonably create, and if including a Cringely post would make Google News better for their users, then they would include it. After all, we are thrilled when Google News includes Techdirt on their site, but to this date, it is a mystery to us which posts are included -- and we don't feel entitled to that inclusion. That said, Cringely's ire is a reminder to the media outlets that there are plenty of sites that would love to take their place in news aggregators, if the opportunity should arise, so perhaps they should count their blessings for now.

Filed Under: google news, journalism, robert x. cringely
Companies: google

Italian Newspapers Get Gov't To Investigate Google For Not Sharing Ranking Secret Sauce

from the seriously-delusional dept

A bunch of folks have been sending in the news that Italian regulators have begun an investigation into Google, at the request of some Italian newspapers. The complaint is a typical one from newspapers who seem slightly clueless about how Google works. They say that Google News is unfair -- even though they can opt-out, but don't. The newspapers falsely claim that if they opt-out of Google News, they also have to opt-out of Google Search. That's simply untrue. But even if it were true, I'm not sure what the point would be. Getting traffic is a good thing. It's unclear why Italian newspapers (or any newspapers) don't like it.

In fact, the whole idea that Google News is unfair for sending traffic is undermined by the other complaint from the newspapers: that Google doesn't reveal how it ranks stories:

Because Google does not disclose the criteria for ranking news articles or search results, he said, newspapers are unable to hone their content to try to earn more revenue from online advertising.

Of course, that's silly. First, plenty of people have figured out how to optimize for Google -- there's a whole industry called SEO that does that. That doesn't mean that Google needs to reveal the secret sauce. But the best response to the demand for Google to reveal how it ranks stories comes from Danny Sullivan, who turns the story around, and wonders how newspaper would feel in the other direction:

No newspaper editor of any quality would allow an external interest to walk into their newsroom and demand to know exactly how to guarantee a front page article about whatever they want. But that's what the Italian papers seem to desire. Google has an editorial process for producing rankings, one that's done using automation -- but the papers seem to want to bypass those editorial decisions.

Exactly. The newspapers are basically demanding that their stories get ranked higher, but how would newspaper editors feel about the subjects of stories in the paper demanding that their stories be on the front page. After all, being on the front page would get the subject of a story more attention, and the newspaper isn't paying those subjects -- so the newspaper is "getting all the value." -- at least according to newspaper logic.

Sullivan also does a good job highlighting how useless it would be if the newspapers did get the details on how Google ranks stuff, because then everyone would just start writing stories to get to the top of the list, and any "advantage" would be lost. Separate from that, shouldn't we be just a bit troubled to find out that the newspapers are interested in figuring out how to write stories that top Google, rather than writing stories to better inform the populace?

Filed Under: antitrust, editorial, google news, italy, journalism, news, ranking, seo
Companies: google

Guardian Asks UK Gov't To Investigate Google News For Not Contributing To Journalism?

from the wrong-target dept

It had seemed like perhaps The Guardian newspaper in the UK understood how the internet worked. After all, execs there had been saying that they hoped the NYTimes would start charging, since it would just drive a lot more traffic their way. However, it seems like not everyone at The Guardian is on the same page. Similar to Feargal Sharkey's call demand that the UK government investigate Google for not giving the recording industry money, The Guardian is now asking the UK government to investigate Google over its Google News product, specifically claiming that Google gets too much benefit from its content. Of course, there's a simple solution to this: take your news off of Google News (or take it offline altogether). But The Guardian doesn't want to do that.

The reasoning is a bit convoluted, but, basically The Guardian says that since the online ad market is tough right now, it can't make enough money on the traffic that Google sends it. So stop accepting traffic from Google, right? No, it can't do that, because then competitors like the BBC would sweep up all of the traffic.

Is it just me, or does this reasoning suggest that The Guardian should be asking the government not to investigate Google News, but the BBC for representing unfair competition? The Guardian's reasoning here is a bit tortured. It seems to be saying it can't compete with other sources due to Google News... even though those other sources have the exact same issue (getting traffic from Google News). It's only real complaint is that the BBC offers its content for free online -- and (though it doesn't appear to explicitly call this out), the BBC is publicly funded and doesn't have to focus on ad revenue like The Guardian does. So why isn't the complaint against the BBC instead of Google News?

The Guardian always struck me as a pretty good paper, but the logic here is hard to understand. If it doesn't want the traffic, fine, don't take it (though, most people recognize that would be a mistake). If the problem is that it can't monetize the content effectively, then that's a business model problem for The Guardian -- not Google News. Finally, if the problem is (as it appears) competition from the BBC, then take it up with the BBC or those who fund it, but don't misplace the blame on Google News.

Filed Under: competition, google news, journalism
Companies: bbc, google, guardian

United Airlines Shares Plummet 75% On Misinformation; Blame Game Begins

from the if-it's-on-the-internet-it-must-be-true dept

Shares of United Airlines' stock tumbled nearly 75% on Monday after an old 2002 report about a United Airlines bankruptcy filing was picked up and circulated as current. How did this happen? Apparently, a staffer at Income Securities Advisors Inc. did a search for "united bankruptcy 2008" on Google, and found an article on the Sun-Sentinel. Though the article was published in 2002, neither the Googlebot nor the Sun-Sentinel website indicated as much, and the news item was published to Income Securities' page on Bloomberg. Once the story hit the wire, shares plummeted from $12 to as low as $3, and 54 million shares traded hands before Nasdaq halted trading to investigate what was going on. After United issued an official "we're really not bankrupt" statement and the confusion started to lift, shares of United returned to a somewhat normal price.

After all the dust has settled, the finger pointing has now begun. Who is to blame, if anyone? Sure, the Sun-Sentinel published the story on its site with an ambiguous date, but having archived articles on your site isn't a problem. However, they should really make the dates on their articles more obvious, since they apparently have pretty good SEO. As for Google, they are indeed guilty of publishing an inaccurate date, but as we've seen before, their usual recourse is to blame the site for the problem, and, that said, their terms of service clearly state that they are not liable for the accuracy of their data. As for Income Securities and Bloomberg, perhaps they will be more careful next time before they publish stories, or perhaps not. The thing is, mistakes happen (like Bloomberg publishing Steve Jobs' obituary last month) and rumors turn out to be false every day. Income Securities will "pay" for their mistake, since now they will need to earn back the trust of their clients.

For stock traders, timely information translates into moneymaking opportunities. A few decades ago, it would take a few days for the market to react to information (thereby creating a nice opportunity for the shrewd trader). Today, the speed with which information travels (and the market reacts) has increased considerably, as is clearly illustrated by this event. Sure, shares of United are still trading at approximately 10% less than its opening price on Monday, but perhaps that's more a reflection of the fact that a chapter 11 filing would not come as a surprise to anyone at this time. So, it appears that, in actuality, it's pointless to assign blame, since there doesn't seem to be a problem -- the system worked just as it should.

Filed Under: bankruptcy, blame game, false report, google news, information, news, stock market
Companies: bloomberg, google, income securities, sun-sentinel, united airlines

Conspiracy Theory About Google In League With UN Corruption Doesn't Pass The Sniff Test

from the um,-please dept

It's no secret that people are fairly opinionated (one way or the other) about Fox News. I'm not going to weigh in on that debate, other than to note that there's a bizarre story making the rounds on FoxNews.com claiming that Google made a journalist "disappear" from Google due to his efforts to expose UN corruption. The problem is that this is simply untrue, and any basic fact checking by the Fox reporter would have made that clear. The guy in question wasn't removed from Google, but from Google News, which the search engine is quite clear is only a hand-chosen collection of publications, which the company reviews regularly. For better or for worse (and I actually tend to think for worse), Google has set some rules in terms of what types of sources can appear in Google News -- and this guy's site did not appear to qualify, hence the site getting bounced from the Google News index (not the wider Google). However, when people complained, and the guy provided proof that his organization might actually meet Google's standards, Google News agreed to put it back in the index. In other words, there's no story here. It has nothing to do with his reporting on UN corruption or Google's political views. It's certainly unlikely that the UN asked Google to remove him (as the guy implies). It's nice to cook up some conspiracy theory, but there's nothing to support the charges here. The Fox article does lay out some of these details at the end of the article, but the headline and opening certainly make you think that Google vindictively removed this guy from its index to punish him for exposing UN corruption.

Filed Under: google news, un corruption
Companies: google

Google Resorting To Begging To Get Folks To Comment On The News?

from the not-working-so-well,-huh? dept

It was a bit surprising when Google launched its feature for Google News that would allow those in a news story to comment on the story directly on Google News. After all, wouldn't that just invite abuse? Google would have to make such an effort to make sure that the real people were the ones who wanted to comment that it would easily outweigh any benefit to offering the feature. Even more important, though, is that there's hardly any lack of outlets for anyone who wants to get "their side of the story" out. You certainly don't need Google News. It's not hard to set up your own website or blog and give your side of the story these days. Hell, Google has it's own tools to help you do both of those things already. The NY Times is now checking in on the Google News program almost five months after it launched and apparently the real issue is that no one seems to care about the offering at all. Google has to proactively contact people in various news stories and beg them to comment on Google News, and even then only a very small number of people are doing so. At any one time, there are only around 140 to 150 comments on all of Google News, suggesting that the program is barely used at all. It seems that Google would get better results figuring out how to tie an individual's blog or personal website to a story, rather than begging them to comment directly on Google News.

Filed Under: google news
Companies: google