News Outlets to Seek Bargaining Rights Against Google and Facebook
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But markets for information are leaky. Consumers can get information without paying the distributor. Many consumers can't tell the difference between high-quality information and information that's deceptive or manipulative. Most consumers aren't willing to pay for high-quality information.
So markets for information don't work as well as markets for widgets. Producers don't get paid, the supply of quality information is diminished, and we are all poorer as a result.
Now the producers want to form a cartel to negotiate with distributors as a bloc. But this only increases the cost of content to the distributor.
A cartel doesn't fix the root cause. Consumers still don't want to pay. Increasing the cost without changing consumers' willingness to pay will only make a bad situation even worse.
At a higher cost, even less high-quality information will be demanded, so even less will be produced. Producers will shrink further into irrelevance, low-quality information will dominate, and we'll all be even poorer.
When consumers aren't willing to pay, markets don't work well.
It's unlikely consumers will suddenly become willing to pay for information they can get for free, so feeds will fill up with even more low-quality, deceptive and manipulative information.
Maybe markets just aren't the right mechanism. Since the public needs high-quality information now more than ever, maybe we need to examine non-market methods to produce it.
Just like Fox is #1 because it's the only not-liberal media outlet, a real not-liberal newspaper would have a huge following because of the lack of alternatives.
The first problem is that people say they are willing to pay for certain things, but are not willing to do so in fact. So even if you spend money producing NON-liberal content, you may, in a content marketplace with Facebook and Google, find few buyers who were ACTUALLY willing to give you money for it. This issue in particular, bedevils many industries. It's not at all unique to content industries, and even so, few people have found consistently workable solutions to address it.
The second issue is the fact that you would have to begin to produce content for sub-cultures. TheGirondin will only pay for content he/she construes to be NON-liberal. Others will be willing to pay only for content that they construe to be NON-conservative. Still others will want content they construe to be NON-Christian. And then some will want content they construe to be NON-Islamic. For some the content will need to be NON-Mexican. And some will want the content to be NON-Black. Etc etc etc.
We shouldn't underestimate the costs required to produce such content, nor the limited size of the audience of people who would ACTUALLY pay for such content. It is at once extraordinarily expensive for you to produce such content, and at the same time, extraordinarily cheap for Google and Facebook to distribute that expensive content for free anyway. In some of the worst cases, it's almost Quixotic to even try.
(Consider... what sports content could you produce without black people? You could certainly create sports leagues that disallow blacks. That would not be the issue. However, assuming you did spend all the money to do so...
you run into the second problem...
Who would pay you for that content with the regular sports leagues around competing with you?)
Like uh The Wall Street Journal? Lol.
And what do you do if your preferred media posts what may be construed as a liberal headline? Just unsubscribe immediately? Snowflake, much?
No, because I'm not fragile like liberals are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProPublica
National Public Radio in the US gets the vast majority of its funding from individual donors along with some corporate sponsorship. Government funding is less than 15%.
http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances
Recently Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales founded WikiTribune, an experiment in crowdfunded professional journalism.
Anyway, news has been funded by advertising since news for a while. What broke that model was when the internet made paper packaging irrelevant. This means that the "market" dynamics have always been weird. The news was a way of selling a stack of paper that had used car inserts hidden in it.
Anyway, I don't think there are any obvious fixes. I do think the giant exaggerators need to admit that they're creating markets for information and consciously look to create better ones. For example, Google created a crap marketplace for content on youtube. It's encouraging spam. They should ditch it and start again, with the explicit goal of encouraging good content. That means they need to trust themselves to define good
Then cable companies let us pay $12 per month for ad-free TV.
Today we pay $60 per month for basic cable plus 16 minutes of ads per hour.
The legacy news media has completely failed to understand two things 1) that distribution is king, not content and 2) that their potential customers have so many more options now than just news. They gave away their distribution to Google and Facebook and still think that better content is the driver of their businesses. I am sick of hearing the CEO of News Corp whining about Google and Facebook. They could easily have invested in creating their own alternative distribution networks, but they completely blew the opportunity they had, with MySpace and they could have bought Instagram, What's App, SnapChat (if you don't think these are news networks then you've not been paying attention). So now they go whining to the government? Shame on them.
They aren't news networks. They are social networks that carry news. That's the main problem news organisations face - news is no longer an individual destination for users, it's something they pick up with other content. Any news organisation that bought Instagram would never have been able to execute on it, because its strength was always in social connections, not in delivering news.
People rightly criticise news companies for their "outdated business models", but I'm yet to see anyone propose a modern business model that would actually work. When the bulk of traffic comes from Google and Facebook (I don't realistically see how anyone could have stopped this from happening) you're stuck chasing clicks no matter what. Subscriptions help you earn money, but they drastically cut back your reach.
I don't have any particularly good answers myself, but I really, really don't like the world we live in today where clickability is the primary metric of success - it leads to overhyped outrage and outright fiction being posted to people's walls every day. And FB and Google sit on top of it all earning more and more money. They have no incentive to change anything.
A successful and free press is in every citizen's interest, but today's business environment makes it all but impossible to succeed.
If cornered on it with laws like the Spanish link tax, they're more than happy to just leave until the business situation is more favorable to them, and obviously if any given single provider bans Google's collection, Google can simply post from one of the litany of blogs that reposts other journalists' reporting instead.
>The problem is that Google and Facebook are more than willing to steal that content
Really? While Facebook was letting people copy video content from Facebook with no penalty (freebooting), this was never an issue for the news companies. As for the Spanish situation, the news companies gave in because they realised that without Google they had even less distribution than before.
Obviously for the news agencies, their hope would be that Google be somehow forced to pay them for access and not be allowed to shut down the service. Of course, it's hard to imagine how the government could require Google News to operate as a service.
The thing that's broken here is that in any other content situation like movies or music, the content is unique and copyrighted. If you want Katy Perry or Star Wars, you have to deal with the companies with rights to those, and the MPAA and RIAA are formidable industry associations which can swing a lot of weight and force a negotiation. If you want any "music" at all, really, you have to sit down with the RIAA.
News, however, can't really be copyrighted that way, since fact can be restated by anyone. It's fair use. In a traditional situation, all the affected corporations (like every major news org) would band together and set the bar for negotiation. Someone like Google would have to comply or lose out on a lot of information to base their services on. However, in the case of news, Google has an infinite amount of blogspam to feed off of that is cannibalizing and resharing the news from journalists. Google wouldn't be hurt enough by news agencies blocking them, at least, compared to how much it would hurt news agencies to not be distributed by them.
They haven't give up their content to Google/Facebook; they give up their distribution. Links to news sites on Google and Facebook are a form of distribution that link back to the original article. As for antitrust, that's somewhat difficult to argue when a new entrant (Facebook) is currently taking a massive amount of distribution and ad revenue away from Google. Who's to say that another new entrant, funded by the legacy news industry, couldn't do the same?
The legacy news media should have, and still should, focus on making or buying new distribution channels. Instead of whining to the government, they should compete in the market.
I doubt news is as easy to enter as you imagine. Google and Facebook are in it due to their dominance in search and social respectively. Both are arguably monopolies in their respective fields, and news distribution runs secondary to that.
I see where they're coming from, but it's also hard to imagine a legal framework that supports what they'd like to have here in the US.
NPR seems to exist in its own ecosystem where its consumers know that they have to pay for the content, but since they haven't tied their product to exclusivity, they don't seem harmed by the shift from the old "pay-to-read" model to the new model. And I'm unaware of their reputation being called into question in any serious way.
So now being able to pick and choose from dozens of great companies for news, both national and international in source, these once "protected" companies need to up their game.
So like with any other industry, if you ignore competition from other sources to include other countries, that are as equally respected or more, you do so at your own peril
I don't have much sympathy here. The history is revisionist: these companies used to be powerful actors who now find their businesses evaporating. And many of them had a big hand in the rise of fake news themselves. They're all apparently blameless in both scenarios.
What? I have yet to see Facebook offer "journalism" of pretty much any kind.
NYTimes is quality journalism. People used to pay for the NYTimes.
Now Google and Facebook offer the news from NYTimes for free.
But they don't. They offer links to the NYTimes. Well, actually they probably get paid to offer links to the NYTimes.
"The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it."
Oh how times change. Another example of a situation where a little bit of forward thinking, rather than clinging to an established model with a blinkered attitude, would have gone a long way.
"How Antitrust Undermines Press Freedom" https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-antitrust-undermines-press-...
Since the WSJ is paywalled the public can't even read their argument.
What's the rationale here? Does paywalling their argument get more subscribers for the WSJ? Or does it intentionally limit visibility to elites likely to have a subscription while keeping the public in the dark?
boohoo. cry me a river. this sounds so entitled. Like the Big Banks who cried for a bailout during the Financial Crisis in 2008. "i deserve help because I make lots of money"
Did they not see the writing on the wall when their analytics showed almost all of their traffic originating from Google and Facebook?
I worked in local news and I think there's probably more hope for smaller, nimble outfits which combine tech and news well to survive. Depending on your geographical location, I think you can provide enough local value to sustain < 10 staff. But then that requires having access to engineers willing to work in such an operation.
"awesome, ok.. so you know what? you win. you are right. we shouldnt link to you without paying you anything. So instead of paying you we've decided to remove all your links from our index. happy? no? but thats what you wanted! no..? ok i am confused.. what do you want?.. wait you want free money? ok.... then"
Its funny, when i read the article it said "this is your last free article this month"
I would love to have fb pay - but i never will.
They still make most of their money from dead tree newspaper subscribers who are almost all over 50 but are losing those subscribers at a massive rate. There is an internal initiative to basically double digital revenue by 2020 to make up for the losses on the paper side but, speaking as someone who worked there, it's not looking good. At all. They brag about how they just got 40k new digital subscribers in the month after Trump got elected but a lot of those are subsidized / deal subs and won't be sticking around in the long term.
It also doesn't help that the NYT continually downsizes its newsroom and editorial staff to make ill-informed forays into tech (The NYT digital r&d department was a complete joke - like they paid 5 engineers high six figure salaries to basically jerk off and put a monitor behind a mirror - oh wow so innovative).
Most of the bloat at the NYT is absolutely in the tech department but they rarely fire anyone there (I quit). They have big teams supporting legacy systems that are used by maybe a hundred people a month. They have an entire lexical / semantic team with a "sophisticated" (re: expensive, old, and clunky) tagging system that does essentially nothing for the NYT, because guess how many people use their "topic" knowledge base (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/hillary-rodham-clinton)? I'll give you a hint: more than zero, but not by much. But there's like four or five full time engineers with six figure salaries supporting it.
I think you run the real risk, when you make your content exclusive, of simply being run over by media that doesn't. Unless you can compete on quality, which they usually do but how long and to what end? Facts aren't copyrightable.