A new licensing program to support the news industry
blog.google
blog.google
Yeah, and what's challenging to the "news industry" is the monopolistic situation on the web and the utter lack of action on the part of US antitrust authorities and their allies. I find it very worrying that Der Spiegel, once the most frequently visited ad-supported news sites in the "old" German web, sees no other hope than partnering with Google. Sorry if I'm being too harsh, but the problem can't be solved by Google, when the problem is Google. Der Spiegel once more showing they completely outsold their journalistic punch and demonstrating basic media incompetence (which is the very last thing you want a credible publisher to do).
Unfortunately, while there is still some business there—it's nothing compared to what it used to be. Most companies just go the online ads route now.
I would love to see the kind of push back you mention... but it would be a David v. Goliath task at this stage, except David forgot his sling at home.
YouTube is also a monopoly that wields its power with impunity. Content creators can be in business one day and out of it the next. Large corporations can claim nearly anything theirs and Google won't do anything about it while smaller content creators can see their IP infringed upon by the former and have no recourse.
I think if you use copyright music YouTube detects that’s automatically and gives them the ad revenue? That’s what the Vevo agreement was.
you cannot solve google unless you want to outlaw any site aggregating results from across the web. that is what is really clobbering the news industry. they now have to compete with each other when before at most they competed across one city and at most one country for people's attention and money.
I do find it bizarre that on this site that people complain about Google and ads when most brag about blocking them and still complaining about how intrusive some advertising solutions are. Then throw in the crowd that is always complaining about how much something cost or how some services should be free or reduced and then you might be getting close to the other half of the problem.
People are fucking cheap. If they don't have to pay they will more than likely go that route and quite a few will accept a sub standard experience. Part of that acceptance is from truly desiring to save money but some if from "sticking it to them" in reference to the company they perceive they are short changing.
The traditional media only surived because they had little competition and there's a decent barrier to entry when it came to publishing information/news. Now they're competing with every other media outlet in the world, plus anyone with a blog or YouTube channel. Add this to ways the news is discussed online (people can just paraphrase details from stories and discuss them on social media), and the value of a news story has just completely crashed.
Does that mean Google and Facebook haven't done any damage? No probably not. The fact they control so much of the advertising market has had some effects, and some might say things like requiring paywalled stories to be viewable without a subscription in search has had an effect too.
But the fundamental issue isn't that. It's that the internet and technology has fundamentally broken the business model these outlets used to rely on, and there's basically nothing they can do to change that.
Keeping with what's new in society is important insofar as having an informed population is vital for the correct functioning of a democracy. But the "news industry" is 95% gargabe and contributes zero to getting people informed. I firmly believe that if the news industry disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn't be much worse off as a society.
That google is a bad player should be dealt with on its own. We shouldn't be using the "news industry" as a justification for breaking google up.
EDIT: In fact I had never thought about it, but even as far as keeping people informed, google is better than the "news industry". At least with google I can find links which I use as starting points for reasearching something.
State run broadcasting has always been mandatory around here but at least when there's a number of competitors - even when I don't like any of them particularly much - I can still shop around to see more angles that one or more of them don't want me to see.
You're still only seeing the angles the govt permits and sanctions.
I don't need a 5GB JS-infested "website" to access what amounts to a few KB of the actual information I was looking for. This is something hackernews gets right as far as community engagement goes.
Truthfully, you could probably get by just reading wikipedia and utilize the sources. Most news doesn't have have a baring on my life and if it does it'll work its way to me.
I suspect those who are happier in life forget all of this and focus on themselves, no news, no machines picking out what content you'll see or read.
We no longer have a news industry, we have a propaganda industry filled with political commenters and activists not journalists (that is both left and right)
> Facts matter but stories sell.
I would say this -- the correct functioning of democracy -- is among the most important things there are.
So we surely need journalism ('the news industry') to improve, not just go away.
Even the news on public broadcasting channels is paid for: through public funding and - ultimately - taxpayer money.
It used to be that you would pay to get a newspaper, or you would have a yearly subscription to the newspaper. Add in advertising and newspapers were able to break even. Reach in the analogue world was limited to a local city, region or country. Scaling simply didn't make much sense. Local news was a matter of ensuring that the paper would still be around next year to report on local affairs. And local communities had a stake in ensuring that their paper stayed operational.
Then there was the Web. Originally conceived as a way of exchanging research information, the foundational idea was to remove all bars and give open access to whatever is published. The early Web pretty much thrived on this idea up until the dotcom boom when e-commerce started to explode.
News outlets enthusiastically joined the fray, publishing articles and content for free.
But as internet connectivity became mainstream and penetrated all strata of society, an ever increasing influx of visitors also meant rampant costs and expenses to cater to those ballooning audiences. This happened rapidly.
By the time newspapers - or any publisher - started to add paywalls to their content, it was already too late. Others seized the moment, and bigger fish had successfully consolidated the market around their offering, buying and leveraging news outlets and advertising as links in larger chains that drive consumers towards the convenience of online consumerism.
You are right, saving the current players that constitute the news industry isn't a justification for breaking up conglomerates that influence the current trend of news making. But creating a more level playing field for new players to entering sustainable and durable news reporting with modern business models, is. While at the same time promoting why consumers should pay for the news they read on line, and making it clear why that's important.
I would love to see a new model take form, one that restores actual journalism. A good business model to sustain is the hard part.
I don’t think music did very well as a result.
I think everyone forgets that the majority of activity in any industry is likely to be absolute garbage and in need of reform.
This does not mean the best next step is to destroy that system wholesale.
The music industry is not doing great and this is fine. You would say it's definitely terrible if you are a musician clinging to the dying once-prevailing industry models that did not adapt to the Internet. That's your fault (as a musician), though.
> the majority of activity in any industry is likely to be absolute garbage and in need of reform.
> This does not mean the best next step is to destroy that system wholesale.
Kill it and start over. Why is this not a good thing?
Not all are run by Robert Murdoch.
I would say Google is a very bad actor replacement. A lot of us ( I think) are critical enough to know when news through Google seems to be politically motivated.
But many people don't...
They all had perfectly good reasons to not have to deal with the headache of losing money.
But that would require keeping the ad sales team they had on board and making a similiar product online.
But everyone got scared and lazy and saw a one quarter jump by dumping a bunch of staff.
To me, it feels like it was just market forces driving those decisions. They could have kept the ad sales team and fewer ads, but that doesn't mean that would have worked out.
I think it's the economy of scale that's difficult to achieve. An employee has to bring in thousands of dollar just to pay for own salary, that's millions of views per month. The costs and revenues don't add up to sustain a large company and it has to spam (low quality) content to survive.
Sure they did. The market 100% absolutely drove papers to transition to digital ads. If everyone in an industry makes the same change, how can you argue that said change wasn’t demanded by the market? To argue that they got lazy completely ignores the economic forces that have motivated print publications over the last 30 years. Scared? Sure. Lazy? Spend some time in a newsroom and see for yourself how desperate they are.
Newspapers used to have two primary sources of income: subscriptions and advertising. Subscriptions brought in pretty stable income while advertising brought in higher margins with increased variability. The two were also deeply linked: advertising rates were set largely on the amount of reach that a paper had through its distribution. Papers with higher distribution could command higher advertising fees.
Then the internet came along and hollowed out the subscription base for publications around the country. Income streams for papers decreased and became less stable at the same time. As subscriptions dropped, so did the paper’s ability to advertise. To supplement income shortfalls and try to figure out how to exists in the digital age, papers started adapting their business models for the internet. They saw decades of declining print advertising revenues, driven largely by a shift towards cheap and targeted online advertising.
If google gets any cut in such a system, or even gets a slight benefit, or even knows who has what subscriptions and uses that information - then I'm completely against it. But if they spend their own money developing platforms that they then have no control over and no benefit from - good! Otherwise - bad!
They had something close to this with Google Contributor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
You add a few dollars to your online account, nominate which participating sites you want it to work with, and you would get an ad-free / paywall-free experience on those sites. The sites would determine the price per page - some only charged 1c, while some smaller blogs charged 5c. Some large Australian newspapers signed up, and apparently Mashable and The Onion were part of it at launch.
Ultimately every website I followed pulled out of the program. It seems that advertising revenue earns more for newspapers than anyone is prepared to pay for news. I never even used up the $5 I put into my Google Contributor account.
(I could be wrong, it's years since I last used Flattr. I'm surprised but glad to see they're still around.)
Besides, if they foot the bill for finding out how such a micropayment system that actually works would look like, I guess it might still be a net win for everyone, because that would drastically lower the bar of entrance for competitors. Figuring that out would probably require very expensive iterations.
Google is paying news organizations to stop chastising them for hurting their revenues. While they're at it, also coup some good PR.
Does a reader want free* paywalled news? You have to use google. Does a news org want a pie of the Google free* news budget? You have to partner with Google.
Solidifies even more Google position as an immovable object. One less reason not to use Google Search/News. One less reason for not relying on Google for revenues.
One less reason for everyone to question Google market position and do anything about it.
I'm thinking a diverse web that isn't controlled by another big actor might be enough of a long term benefit to google.
Some times I get the feeling that these huge actors don't necessarily silo everything because they necessarily think it's a good idea, but because if they don't someone else will and that's a bad thing.
"We have to silo things so no one else will" is an excuse for bad behavior, and a risible one at that. If Google wanted a web that couldn't be siloed, they have the money and brains to build that. They choose to build silos instead.
Australia was/is gearing up to force Google to pay. Was anything similar brewing in Germany or Brazil?
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/making-facebook-and-...
They tried to force Google (and others) to pay, but instead of paying, Google asked "give us permission to use your content or we'll have to delist you", and many obliged, while other aggregators suffered.
I believe in Spain Google News just outright shut down.
Then I realized that it was purely about a distributor musing about paying content providers in the hopes they can influence it, at least ostensibly for "quality".
I see nothing wrong with the idea. Money is our way of measuring value, and information certainly has value and Google has been making mint extracting the excess value from information for a long time, to the point that little actually leaks through to the end consumer.
I thinks this move would increase the quality of news, but the consumer needs to understand that the product they are consuming is influenced by the media through which they consume it. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, as they say.
They didn't really go into details. Are we going to see "Google Licensed" news agencies now? That does not sit well with me.
If this depends on Google, or Paypal, or Apple, and you can only donate to a site if you have PayPal, or if you have Google Pay, or whatever, it will never reach its true potential.
It should be kind of like email, where everyone has email. Once everyone has an "email-like" digital wallet, and all of these websites accept "email-like money" through micro-donations, I think content monetization would work much better.
It got worse unfortunately, the journalists were caught faking scenes. https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-s...
Then the fake news was discovered: https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg
Same newspaper, same story, contradictory reporting. Obviously this was done for different places.
People started discovering that news is heavily fake. Why buy something when they are outright lying to you? This is the reason the news industry is dying.
> Same newspaper, same story, contradictory reporting. Obviously this was done for different places.
I believe you are misinformed. A couple searches on the headlines tells a different story.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wsj-different-trump-headli...
> Yes, the images represent two different editions, published at different times, and the headlines represent the news at the time of publication — before and after his speech.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wall-street-jou...
> While the two covers are both authentic, they were published at different times on that day to reflect evolving developments.