Google Made $4.7B from the News Industry in 2018, Study Says | Hacker News Reader

Google Made $4.7B from the News Industry in 2018, Study Says

nytimes.com

93 pointswoodgrainz33 comments

This is one of the flimsiest things I've ever seen in my life.

Turns out the number is entirely based on a quote in 2006 from Fortune editor Jon Fortt:

“The online giant figures that Google News funnels readers over to the main Google search engine, where they do searches that do produce ads. And that’s a nice business. Think of Google News as a $100 million search referral machine” [1]

He claims he got the number from Marissa Meyer at a tech conference lunch session, but without quoting her directly, and there's zero detail about whether it is supposed to represent revenue or a long-term valuation of the business.

Then the "study" says $100M was 0.7% of Google's revenue in 2006, and assumes it's still proportionally the same, which makes it $4.7B. [2]

Which is completely ridiculous. Google is a vastly larger and more diversified company now, but more importantly hardly needs News to drive users to Search. (Back in 2006 when Yahoo was still a major competitor maybe it did drive meaningful traffic to Search that wouldn't have occurred otherwise, but that's very hard to argue today.)

[1] http://fortune.com/2008/07/22/whats-google-news-worth-100-mi...

[2] pg. 23 of http://www.newsmediaalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/...

That's not quite a correct summary of their methodology.

They're indeed starting from that $100M/year, and scaling it up directly by revenue growth. But Google's revenue didn't grow by 47x in that time. So the number they end up attributing to Google News is $700M/year, which is still pretty ludicrous for a site with no ads nor other kind of monetization.

Where does the missing $4G come from? Well, they assume that Google Search does 6x the news traffic of Google News, and then apply that 6x factor to the fabricated $700M number too.

Its even more bullshit then

Jeff Jarvis: "Utter bullshit. Snippets in search are NOT content. Jeesh. They are links TO the publishers. Google does not monetize Google News. When it makes money on news it's by serving ads ON publishers' sites."

https://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/status/1137980486062678017

Somewhat related, I really wish HN had a "bullshit" tagging option. In my mind there is so much copious bullshit flying around these days, and that the concept is different enough from just "flag" or a downvote, that it deserves it's own callout.

One can argue that these days title of an article is all that article is. Many people don't read body of the article at all

Why did you post a fake news article an then also post the debunk?

It's not a "fake news article." It's a real article in a major publication that is worthy of discussion.

The article doesn't seems to be worth to be published in NY Times. The $4.7B was computed based on how much the Google's revenues increased since 2008 when Google News was bringing in $100M per year. Oh, how accurate this study must be....

The New York Times is an institution that's failing to live up to it's reputation. Too many of it's stories are editorialized to the point where they're not much better than someone's blog

I'm confused on what the definition of "Google News" is. Is it https://news.google.com/ plus the Google News app, or does it also include the news links shown in Google Search results? I imagine it's the latter, given that is probably how most people use Google.

I also don't understand where Google is supposedly making huge revenue on news. Is it solely ads in Google Search? Anecdotally, I just queried for a few different subjects that are in the news today, and there were zero ads in the results.

It would be difficult to find a single news publisher that doesn't use DFP (Doubleclick For Publishers) to serve ads, and presumably lots of them are also using GDN (Google Display Network) at least to fill up unsold inventory

Not to mention how much they push AMP and they whitelist which ad networks are allowed to serve ads on AMP [0]

It's very naive to think Google doesn't profit from the News industry.

[0]: https://amp.dev/it/documentation/components/amp-ad?format=we...

> Not to mention how much they push AMP and they whitelist which ad networks are allowed to serve ads on AMP

One can only hope that AMP will be the court case of the digital century. Whether Google's obscenely obvious anti-competitive projects are allowed to flourish or wither will have a major impact in the development of the World Wide Web going forward.

The industry group that represents the publishers here is not talking about the sell-side ad tech, they're perfectly happy showing ads to their users. They have lots of choices for sell-side platforms anyway, it's a very robust and competitive market. They're talking about search results and Google News, their belief being that Google should share search advertising revenue with them because their content contributes to the value of search results.

I think it's all related to the sell-side of adtech, publisher revenues have been going down for years while Google keeps on growing, with AMP and Google News as weapons to keep revenue hostage from publishers.

Added to that the permanent threat of SEO de-ranking (as the Daily Mail complained about recently), the relationship between publishers and Google is fragile.

This article wasn't about profits from ads on news sites though. You're replying to a strawman.

The study in question appears to only be including ad revenue from Google properties (with some interesting assumptions baked-in) for news related search queries and Google News.

I'd imagine that they're ignoring the DoubleClick ad revenue because it's doesn't generate a click bait headline. Google pays no-name publishers 68% of the ad-revenue they get, so I'd imagine for a name brands like NYT news sites capturing a much larger share from the Google ads on their properties.

The bullshit content on NYT this week seems to be through the roof... It's like they slurped up all the Vox and BuzzFeed people or something.

  according to a study to be released on Monday by the News 
  Media Alliance.

  ...which represents more than 2,000 newspapers across the
  country, including The New York Times.

Clearly tech companies have won in the past couple decades where content producers have lost, but the claims levied article are disingenuous to the point that this should really be in the Op-Ed section.

Details and study as PDF (27 pages) has been released today: https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/release-new-study-google-r...

They also provide a pre-written Op-Ed, which differs from the NYT version: https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/google-study-oped/

NYT from 10 years ago would not have published this unsubstantiated propaganda piece.

Facts are commodity in the age of search engines, and the only "value add" journalism brings to the table is "opinions". Even the once infallible NYT apparently cannot resist this fundamental change, and this article is one grain of sand in a barren desert of listless opining masquerading as news.

journalists actually find + report facts, and check them. Without journalists, there would be far fewer facts! Pick up any newspaper - in every article, in every paragraph, you will most likely find a newly minted fact produced and edited by a knowledgeable professional.

Except the "advocate journalist" is more about setting a narrative and using deception as necessary than getting facts straight.

This. So much this. The NY Times is a shell of its former self reverse mortgaging hard-earned reputation one bad story at a time until it has burned through all of its equity.

A.M. Rosenthal would be spinning in his grave right now.

* Can someone explain how Google makes money from sending clicks to NYT ?

news.google.com doesn't seem to show ads.

* If it is "user search on foo" --show ads on results page-> "user clicks on ad and also goes to nyt article on foo"

that seems fair.

one way i think about it ... imagine if google, facebook & twitter could somehow physically no longer link to news stories on any of their properties ... like if there was some magical switch that was thrown ... how much would their traffic fall, and how much would their revenue fall? I could easily see that being in the multi billions industry wide. so in that sense they are making money from news content.

it's like a pyramid scheme - web firms stripping value from news companies until there is none left - and then what? Most of the interesting content on the internet is, in fact, generated by professional newsgatherers. Take that away and the web itself loses enormous, enormous value.

Unrelated, but I observe common flow:

1. User searches for SOMETHING

2. Users click ad that leads to www_SOMETHING_com

3. First result, under the ad, was the organic link to www_SOMETHING_com

Is there no way to disable my own ad, if my site is the first result anyway? Will then Google show ads for my competitors instead? That doesn't sound fair at all.

Here is the actual study [pdf] http://www.newsmediaalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/...

No link to the "study" itself so we can review its methodology. No critical inquiry at all from the NYT. It's treated as truth immediately despite the absurdity on its face.

And how much did the news industry make from Google?

Well that explains why the youtube trending feed is favored to traditional news media and tv-shows, instead of independent creators.

I believe that's because traditional news media and tv-shows get auto-approved for trending (it's really not trending, it's "recommended"), while everything else (save their top nonsense vloggers, I suppose) has to be manually approved to be allowed to "trend".

They said as much when the "David Hogg Crisis Actor" video was trending. They didn't catch it because the actual video was unaltered content from a major news outlet, so it got automatically approved.

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