Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

What is it that causes news companies to lose money because of Google and Facebook? I am still visiting their site to read the article.

If you only read the headline, you aren't a serious consumer of news anyway.

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It's a consequence of three things:

1. Facts can't be copyrighted.

2. Continuous publishing.

3. Google and Facebook cause a large preference for free content.

If you do great journalistic work and try to charge for it, moments later (no longer a full day) someone else will change a few words around and offer it for free. And Google and Facebook will lead everyone to their story.

Those who create value are unable to capture it. This leads to great journalists getting fired, quality declining, a less informed populace.

> 3. Google and Facebook cause a large preference for free content.

And hackernews. I think the most frequent kind of post on this site is a complaint about a paywall. The second most frequent kind of post is a workaround or alternative source sidestepping a paywall.

edit: That's not to say the scale is anywhere near the same. HN is a not going to show up on any news site's radar. But the problem is the same.

Agreed. And I just want to clarify: I don't think there are any bad guys here. Just a dysfunctional system.

Couldn't it be argued that people just have a large preference for free content regardless of how they find it?

With such a focus on money, having it, and keeping it (especially in the West), it seems only natural that people would naturally gravitate towards free content of all kinds. If not through HN/Google/wherever, it seems they'd spend the time figuring out a way to find it elsewhere.

Agreed. I think it will be especially interesting to watch things in the EU as the link tax seems to me to be partially aimed at stopping the rephrasing and linking back to a paywalled article by another free website, and the copyright directive seems to be aimed at stopping a single user with access from posting the entire article in some comment which I see happen a bunch on reddit and sometimes here.

The issue is probably most people are not reading the article anymore. When you have enough comment density, actually reading comments is more like a summary service.

When you come from a Google search they remove the pay wall apparently. I searched for an extension for specifically the wall street journal since people regularly post workarounds for their site on here and found the leading extension just puts the referrer as a Google search for dozens of sites. They warn you to blacklist any organizations you actually pay for or have a login for since the extension deletes all cookies as well. I assume Facebook works similarly.

Is that not something the news organization does though? Google isn't removing the paywall, they are.

> you aren't a serious consumer of news anyway.

This is basically all of their ad dollars, what you described there.

So do they believe that FB users will instead go to their site specifically to search for the article?

On mobile, for example, some news sites are hosted via Google's AMP service. I think that's at least one of the avenues for this supposed 'misuse'.

AMP still has ads and the publishers chose to install AMP.

In that case they can just, you know, stop using AMP.

That makes no sense. The news sites implement AMP themselves. There's no way your site can become AMP'd automatically or accidentally.

Which is why this is merely a political stunt in order to save the revenues of failing Australian conservative press organisations (News Corp, etc.)

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