News is a lousy business for Google too | Hacker News Reader

News is a lousy business for Google too

cdixon.org

31 pointsALee12 comments

Does somebody have a link to the forward-thinking newspaperman whose thesis was that the newspaper business model was fundamentally that they had a regional monopoly on social permission to mail a bunch of ads direct to your doorstop in such a manner that you would actually read them? I saw it on HN first, I think, and it dovetails with this post very well.

Google is now the business with social permission to beam advertising directly into your brain.

It's a must read... though now it's going to bug me until I find it again. Can the internet please hire an archivist to file all the good articles by category and topic?

Would love to read that... please can you repost if you do find?

I assume you're referring to Clay Shirky's excellent essay "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking...

Bill Wyman's _Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing_ may fit the bill:

http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/five-key-reaso...

Some people liked the news, sure; most thought they were paying for it. And some papers spent more money on news than they had to. But the papers weren’t selling the news. They were selling ads and charging a lot of money for them because of one thing only: They held an informal monopoly on a societal convention whereby they deposited those ads—around which they wrapped some reporting, some of it serious, some of it fluff—on subscribers’ driveways.

Wyman is a long-time arts journalist and editor. He's also the author of one of my favorite bits on San Francisco:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/11/03/sf/index.html

That is it, thanks.

News is only lousy for Google because Google insists on relevant, targeted, advertising.

Compare in the pre-internet world with CNN.com. They had no product except news. Yet lots of companies are very happy to advertise with them. Yes, they know that the ads aren't well targeted. But branding ads aren't supposed to be.

If Google was willing to accept a lower tier of branding ads, they could make more money from news.

Or if they are willing to use identity and behavioral targeting to direct interesting and targeted ads that needn't be relevant to the particular page a user is browsing.

They are willing to do that: It's a large reason they acquired DoubleClick. But yes, this is one of the more promising areas of development for ad serving companies, privacy concerns aside. I recently moderated a panel where the panelists explain that, without anything but an IP address, they could tell if a reader had browsed a car site, a new parenting site, etc. and then target ads on a completely unrelated website with that info.

They do it with youtube, the big banding ads near the top of the main page usually. Could easily do the same thing with news, they do have an image to preserve though that anything coming off the google.com domain be highly targeted.

They had no product except news.

They sold a means of delivery, information transport - both news and product information. It just happens that the internet is also good at information delivery.

The problem with the news business is making people aware that information delivery is separate from journalism. A lot of people want the latter. A lot of "journalism" has devolved into trash, however. There is a big opportunity to make money with an easily accessible quality product.

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