Google is giving $1B to publishers to help convince governments not to take more | Hacker News Reader

Google is giving $1B to publishers to help convince governments not to take more

niemanlab.org

222 pointssebwi113 comments

I wonder if we would be having the same conversation if google had charged publishers to add them to the google news product. Even charging $5 a year seems like it could have completely turned this whole situation on its head. For one it would have offered publishers some contractual protections, but mainly it would have changed the publisher's mindset towards google. Now it's a provider of a service they need, and they do need it.

The problem is that the internet made the "news" market way to efficient. Competition is incredibly fierce because the cost of distribution has plummeted, and because it turns out that most people don't read news for news, they read it for entertainment. If Google were to go away tomorrow, the publishers would be in the exact same position with Bing, DDG, Baidu, or whoever picks up the pieces. The economics have shifted, 90% of publishers are now offering a very low value product.

If governments go out and create this artificial market to prop up the "news" they like, not only will it be prone to corruption (What counts as an eligible publisher? Does Google owe the Daily Sun and the BBC the same amount of money? If it's different, who decides by how much?), but in 30-50 years, we'll be talking about the news subsidies the same way we talk about farm subsidies today; a corrupt and wasteful relic from an era that refused to acknowledge things have changed.

All that being said, the sales tax on digital adds is probably the best idea so far, but enforcement is going to be tricky.

Note: farm subsidies may well be corrupt and wasteful but they exist for national security reasons. A country that can't feed itself is completely vulnerable in times of conflict.

It's implausible that we'd ever not be able to feed ourselves without farm subsidies. About half of our wheat is exported. Even if somehow we dropped more than 50% without farm subsidies, we have enough money that we could import from other countries; even if we faced a global ban on exporting food to the United States, it would not be difficult to begin using more land and labor to grow crops within the span of two years.

The US is far from the only country with farm subsidies. Some of those countries (e.g., Switzerland) are in fact not self-sufficient.

> US is far from the only country with farm subsidies

Democracies with lots of farmland, i.e. ones with reduced food security risk, have farm subsidies because they have lots of voting farmers.

It's sort of like how you shouldn't let the national reserve of masks go empty, even if they had not been needed for about 100 years.

The thing about farms is that you can't just start producing stuff right away. It takes months to actually grow out a crop, you need a seed stock ready, and you just can't deal with sudden shocks.

So you have to be always prepared because if you're not, even just for a few years, it can bite you in the ass.

There is no evidence that continuous farm subsidies maintain agricultural output. (That’s mostly correlated to political stability and trade policy.)

Periodic stability mechanisms, yes. But that is the vast minority of farm subsidies.

And the whole amount of farm subsidies that go to alfalfa and cotton and tobacco fail to rise to this argument. Farm subsidies are about buying off a voting bloc. (Disclaimer: I own farmland as an investment.)

I don't think anyone is arguing that there are some subsidies like that or that some are wasteful--you can see as much in the first few posts.

They're arguing that the idea isn't categorically absurd.

I’m not arguing they’re absurd. They’re always going to be present in democracies with agricultural sectors. But if you don’t own farmland, farm subsidies are principally (to the tune of something like 85%, in America, more in Japan and Switzerland) a transfer mechanism. Not national security spending.

That said, they’re political gold and so very reliable. Hence why I own farmland. (It doesn’t grow anything.)

The countries to which we export agricultural products -could not feed themselves- without -our- wheat/soy/corn/etc.

Thats the national security issue.

The largest importers of US agricultural goods are Canada, China, Mexico, and the E.U. Will China collapse if all of a sudden it faces a pork shortage?

> Will China collapse if all of a sudden it faces a pork shortage?

I think the CCP considers securing pork from price shocks to be of vital national importance. It's part of the implicit bargain they've made with the population.

Shhhhhh, you are giving 2020 ideas. And the point isn't that we'd not be able to spin up farms, it's that we'd run out of food before that could be accomplished.

In the context of the USA:

The hypothetical where a geopolitical rival has the capacity to shut down shipping across the entirety of the Atlantic and the Pacific isn't something that will enter the realm of plausibility within the next 5 years or so. 5 years is plenty of time to spin up farms.

That's also ignoring the fact that whether we'd even need to spin up farms in a world without subsidies is an open question.

It's completely plausible that even a modest drop in price or increase in volatility would make it unprofitable for anyone in the US to produce wheat (or other staples). In a free market, they will just stop doing so, and production will drop to near zero.

You're right that imports would make up the difference, but that's where national security comes in. If you rely on importing your food and your trading partners become adversaries or shipping is disrupted due to war, you're screwed.

In the context of the USA:

We are net exporters of all the major staples. At the very least, we can ratchet down subsidies until we are no longer a net exporter of agricultural products; that level of production is sufficient to handle all our essentials.

> If you rely on importing your food and shipping is disrupted due to war, you're screwed.

The biggest exporters of agricultural products to the United States are Mexico and Canada, which also have plenty of excess capacity. Even in the unlikely scenario that some geopolitical rival manages to shut down trade across the Pacific and the Atlantic, we wouldn't be in a place where we have to worry about our food. If somehow our rival also had the capacity to shut down transit of goods across our land borders, they also have the capacity to shut down domestic transit of goods. I.e., even having self sufficiency based on farms in Iowa wouldn't help feed anyone on the coasts.

> We are net exporters of all the major staples. At the very least, we can ratchet down subsidies until we are no longer a net exporter of agricultural products; that level of production is sufficient to handle all our essentials.

lol not if a world war happens buddy. regardless of whether we export staples or not (and we eat more than staples), staples taste horrible without spices, which we import at net 60%, and we need more of everything when we're defending liberal values from being wiped off the earth.

The goalposts have shifted from "having enough food to feed ourselves" to "having enough exotic spices."

Even if we took that argument as compelling, it doesn't explain why we should subsidize wheat and corn instead of said exotic spices.

> The goalposts have shifted from "having enough food to feed ourselves" to "having enough exotic spices."

boo hoo. I never set the first goal posts, nor the second that you imply. They're all only components of maintaining quality of life for our constituents and fellow citizens in a probability distribution of predictable things, including so-called 'black swan' events.

The risk of ending wheat/corn subsidies is so much higher than having them in the first place...

Farm subsidies are a mechanism for transferring tax money to everybody (everybody who eats). It's mostly a form of basic income to provide money to poor masses without the excuse of requiring them to work, so they don't revolt.

Overfarming, exports and food waste are just side effects of this mechanism.

Won’t all the equipment and land (the expensive inputs to farming) still exist if prices drop? Without subsidies, some farmers may become insolvent, but either they will be able to restructure their debt or someone will buy the operation with a cheaper cost structure. Aren’t the same principles at play as in oil extraction or production of any other commodity? If production drops, prices will go back up, and someone will produce to meet the demand. Certainly this would be a cold reality for family farmers, but I don’t see how it results in the US not having any food producers.

The labor and domain knowledge might be lost in a generation. In the same way that the US has lost a ton of manufacturing knowledge, to the point that entire supply chains cannot exist within the country.

The point is to not have to depend on imports. Food is definitely something you want to have in surplus. "Two years" isn't a great length of time to be hungry.

That's not to say our subsidies are targeted well. Not only do we have surplus to export, we have surplus to cram into our own mouths, causing an obesity crisis. We'd be well advised to tune the subsidies to healthier foods. We would still have a wide surplus against a crisis, while eating better.

But unfortunately, long-term dependence on subsidies and some historical accidents of politics have given the existing beneficiaries a very heavy thumb on the scale of decision-making in agricultural policy.

> Note: farm subsidies may well be corrupt and wasteful but they exist for national security reasons. A country that can't feed itself is completely vulnerable in times of conflict.

It's not that different: "news subsidies may well be corrupt and wasteful but they exist for national security reasons. A country that can't agree on what's happening cannot agree on what to do, therefore it's completely vulnerable..."

That may be true.

Except that it's difficult for a farm to actively reduce a country's ability to feed itself, since everyone mostly agrees on what constitutes diseased or poisoned food, and can recognize such, by people getting sick if nothing else.

Can't you apply that logic to most industries?

Depends on the industry. Could a country make do without textiles imports for a couple of years during a conflict? Probably. Could it do without food? Probably not.

Good article and generally agree with the sentiment. Google isn't doing this out of the goodness of its heart. As well as PR generally though, it's as much about owning the consumer. Google and Facebook are increasingly the portals through which the majority of people consume content online. Each wants to protect and grow that - it's central to their business model (and a well-understood strategy generally). The biggest threat to either is disintermediation. That would mean both less eyeballs and reduced ability to profile --> less effective hyper targeting --> reduced attractiveness to advertisers. In that context, $1bn is loose change for keeping the content providers as commodity suppliers behind the Google brand.

I won't pretend to be an expert on big business and the answers to the problems of users expecting free, but I will say that initially Google had a good symbiotic relationship with publishers and that it no longer exists.

News publishers, webmasters suffering lower CTR due to G properties in SERPs, ads placing organic results below the fold, rich snippets taking content from pages to prevent a click through to the site. That kind of thing. It is/was all a bit insidious and now time is being called on it, they seem to be relenting, a bit, at least on face value.

Without Google those sites would lose the majority of their visitors, so what is the point you're trying to get across?

Google has a search monopoly in many countries. Are you implying that if Google did not exist, no one would visit websites any more, or read the news? They were originally a search engine to find other things on the web, not so much a portal.

In fact, that's how Google got their initial foot in the proverbial door - by being just a search engine, and presenting a clean landing page with essentially just the search textbox, at the time when incumbents (Yahoo, Altavista, ...) had their landing pages crowded with news and advertisements so much that the actual search box would get lost in there.

No, I'm not. I'm implying that in my eyes it's hypocritical to complain about being indexed by Google with snippets while benefiting hugely from that [0]. Site owners can control what Google indexes and if a snippet shall be displayed [1].

To me it looks like news publishers failed to adapt their business models to the 21st century and now want to milk Google, even though Google brings them a lot of revenue in the form of visitors.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/5/7160587/german-publisher-... [1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/robots-exclusion-pro...

Search engine is intermediating and increasing competition.

Without SEO competition for articles, we'd probably have fewer but more profitable news websites instead of thousands of sites praying each other's work (asymmetrically).

It's a mixed bag.

Well, I can't argue against what you're saying in your sub-comment here, Google is a for-profit service and provides traffic to other sites, and it's entirely optional via robots.txt whether people want to participate in being indexed.

The problem enters with the insidious tracking that Google uses, that pushes their revenue per 1000 searches to way above any other search provider, alongside their monopoly position in many countries that allows them to be the default search choice in pretty much every major browser and device that's going to search for anything.

Instead of being the agnostic middle-man as search used to be, Google is encroaching on publishers ability to be sustainable propositions, all the while taking their content.

In the UK, Google has 95% of the search market, and 50% of content discovery is via search (sorry, no source at hand). Basically the choice of publishers is to cut off their arm while content aggregators suck the value from their unique content. It's not exactly an elevator pitch to prove the point, but there's countless parties that have elaborated along these lines.

Surely there is room for a search engine purely to point you to other places on the web, is where I stand. Google serving news is just them providing a reason for you to load up google.com rather than any other place, which clearly they've massively succeeded in doing, being a portal rather than a middle man.

Search is really only the main driver of traffic for national sites.

Local and niche coverage get traffic though a mix of social, newsletter subscribers, referrals, and direct visitors.

> Without Google those sites would lose the majority of their visitors

That's not neccessarily true. Without a search engine, those sites would lose the majority of their visitors. But absent Google, another search engine would do the job.

A search engine is a vital component in today's web. "Google search" is not, and its market power dominance doesn't give it a moral blank check.

That's true. However, I fail to see moral wrongdoings by Google in the case of news publishers.

mostly stealing their content in various ways and not compensating them for it

You don’t see an issue with google scraping news contents out of the news articles and displaying a large snippet in the search results that eliminates 90% of the potential visitors?

If they don't want google to display a snippet, then they can "Use the nosnippet meta tag to prevent Google from displaying a snippet for your page in Search results, or use the max-snippet:[number] meta tag to specify the maximum length for your result snippets. You can also prevent certain parts of the page text content from being shown in a snippet by using data-nosnippet". [0]

[0]: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en

That’s playing Google’s game. Where today you “simply” have to do X, which tomorrow will be X plus Y but not Z, and so on. What about Google don’t stealing content by default unless I add a meta tag named yes-google-steal-my-content?

I saw the earliest reference to "nosnippet" in 2007, 13 years ago. Those things are not changing that fast at all.

Did Google change how they do this recently? Because I'm not seeing what you describe. All I see is a headline and an image without any snippet at all.

Just Devil's Advocate, but how would a pure search engine make money without doing what Google does? Let's suppose a hypothetical Google alternative just purely distributes clicks to organic results. Where does the money to pay for its operation come from?

Serious question.

I honestly believe that one of the flaws of the current form of the internet is the need for a search engine.

That's a false dichotomy. As the GP pointed out, Google started with a symbiotic relationship with the websites. Scraping the content and using it to help people find stuff (and profiting handsomely!) is not the problem.

Problem is all other behavior highlighted by GP - pushing organic results below fold, insta-answers totally stopping traffic to sites actually providing that content, and so on.

Google is now using its dominant position in search engine market to effectively bundle search with these other things that negatively impact publishers into an "all or nothing" deal.

"Don't want us to scrape and show your data? You have nice traffic to your page, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it..."

Users want snippets, they want instant answers tho. Just serving 10-blue links, no summary snippet, that forces you to click through and read the page before deciding if it was relevant to you, costs the user both time and bandwidth. If the article is not what I wanted, then you wasted a few seconds of my time that I will never get back, and if I have a metered internet connection, you forced me to load up a lot of junk, eating into my bill, for naught.

If I want to look up the current time, or current temperature, or how old Trump is, I don't want to have to be directed to his biography page at the Whitehouse.gov, where I then must skim-read several paragraphs to find it.

People are saying "but they're not getting the traffic". Well, facts are not copyrightable, and if all I'm looking for is a small specific fact (answer), then I wasn't interested in a full pageview of your site anyway.

Let's say a put 8 hours into writing a programming blog, on say Kotlin, with tutorials and stuff, and someone searches for a question about "which library contains atomics"?, am I supposed to be mad that it answered back "atomicfu" instead of forcing you to read an entire tutorial on Atomicfu I wrote? If the searcher wanted to read a tutorial on atomics, that's what he would have searched for, and likely, he will go examine this library, and then search further about how to use it.

To me, the future of search engines is an AI, like GPT-3, that goes out and digests the world, and then lets me ask questions, which it will synthesize brief answers to exactly what I want. In this world, the news publishers will face the same problem of demonetization, and people will be asking their GPT-5 bot "can you summarize what happened yesterday around COVID-19 and the Whitehouse?"

News is facing a serous pressure now, but is the right answer to attack summarization technology? It seems it's inevitable that content will be understood and transformed by machines in ways that will be hard to litigate by copyright claims if they spew out original work, and therefore the real question is, in a future of Star Trek like search engines, how can news's basic business model and incentives be transformed?

Personally, I agree with Andrew Yang on this, I think a lot of publishing is going to go open source and non-profit, funded by government grants as a basic necessity of democracy, like healthcare, or universal education.

Without a feudal lord, peasants wouldn't have land to farm. News organisations aren't peasants but the issue is that the Lord is able to control & skim the majority of value from the resource (in this case, attention).

They can choose the block google anytime they want; comparing them to lords and serfs is not a good comparison.

Right, and a serf can technically leave. But they can't, because they lose access to the pertinent resource. Where else can they farm?

I don't like the media, I'm not trying to make out they're weak. My issue is that Google monopolising attention and then unilaterally taking news website's work for free is BS. They're skimming the vast majority of value from the industry with no kickbacks. They get away with it because no inidividual news organisation can fight. The only option is collective action (won't work, too much reward for defecting) or legislation.

Without Google, people would find different ways to reach news content.

The problem of "users expecting free" is a trope. It isn't the actual problem.

You get advertising whether or not you pay for a channel. You even get ads at the cinema. You get spied on when you buy a phone, echo, when you use a paid app, subscribe to netflix, etc. It has nothing to do with free, in practice. This is just a way of pointing the finger at the public. "You are being abused because you are cheap and deserve to be".

The "problem" is that advertising & espionage while creating market/portal/platform/feed monopolies is the most profitable strategy in most cases. A lot more profitable than selling stuff is. Just look at the largest fortunes made in recent times. A non-spyware messaging app would never be worth what FB paid for whatsapp, no matter how many paying users it had.

Let's stop pretending that our moral failings and cheapskates are the problem.

Newspapers have often had financial problems, and it has almost always been the case that "hard journalism" is not as profitable as entertainment media. Google are leveraging this to further cement their monopoly. They are the problem, not us. We are the victims.

I want to argue that data gathering (in total) cannot be more valuable than selling stuff (in total), but I think that relies on a naive “pyramid” model of the economy. If I try to model this statement with actors (agents), I think it’s possible to build a set of mutually re-enforcing markets, where the value of data gathering for advertising is actually more valuable in aggregate than the “stuff” being advertised!

Agreed, although the 'selling stuff' market is inevitably more fragmented than the 'data gathering' market, which means that the average 'data gathering' company will be more valuable than the average 'selling' company.

That's not to say there aren't giants like Amazon trying to buck the trend...

Ads are not just data gathering, but behavior nudging as well.

Directing people on what to do could be more valuable than actually selling goods, in aggregate. In particular when their actions have long term ramifications (e.g. politics)

In aggregate, that's only true if the directors are directing people to do things that lead to more money being paid to the directors, which is via shopping or I guess slavery (wage cuts?).

Regarding elections, that would be gaining, or staying in power.

In other ways it could be for insurance or other intangible services that scale well but need to be perceived as somewhat valuable.

Even in cases where you still use goods to capture money, you can price the goods higher through changing buyer’s perception of value. In a way ads can bring you money from thin air if they are effective enough.

This is only just the beginning. Think credit scores, but lot more far reaching. EG qualifying people for jobs, school entry and such.

If that's the case, then advertisement is anti-competitive and thus must be regulated as it violates the economic theory we've all agreed upon. I thought we were told we were all independent consumers making our own choices.

This isn't a theoretical question!

There have been many large fortunes made recently. They prove the point. Facebook/Google are the obvious example.

Companies that are selling stuff for money (spotify, netflix) are bending over backwards to convince investors that this is just pocket money... the real value is in data gathering and monopoly building. Read their prospectus. Netflix's recommendation algorithm narrative was the main focus of their PR for years. There's a reason for this.

Why has Tesla's stock price gone insane? Investors are betting that Tesla's data gathering has given them a meaningful edge in autonomous driving. The market value of this edge is (evidently) more than the market value of all other car companies combined.

Look to tech acquisitions. Why are free apps like snapchat, whatsapp and such worth billions to acquirers like facebook? Have any paid apps even come close to this market value? No, because spyware, adware and monopoly building are far, far more profitable.

Note that I say "profitable" in regards to income and "valuable" in regards to company value. It's true that the economy of buying stuff is big. It just isn't as profitable and therefore not as valuable.

I wasn't aware of their prospectus focus on this. I cannot stop thinking that "capitalism" is optimizing on surveillance. I wonder where that will lead us...

I'm almost thinking it will lead to ROI being less at the end. As they filter everyone through nice funnels ultimately they restrict reach such that "new customers" are less. Once that happens they will come back out to target "other people" not in their finely tuned categories and effectively be about where we are now. If roofers are my best customer as a hammer manufacturer and I market solely to them at some point all hammer manufacturers will come to the same conclusion and they will be fighting for the sole segment.

You need some complex and strange interactions for the customer interfacing market (there's no data gathering market, data gathering is a technique not product) to get larger than the real one in revenue, but it's trivial for it to happen on profit.

I'm not sure it's even possible to discover if profits are concentrated there, the market can look exactly the same either way.

Right — it's really hard to disentangle "discovery" from "object sales". You can end up with a lot of B2B "cycles" that become self-supporting. Basically, the B2B cycles of discovery fund other cycles of "discovery" and the businesses mutually support each (think discovery- and software- as-a-service).

>>"* there's no data gathering market, data gathering is a technique not product) *"

I would challenge this. It's is a technique in the sense that manufacturing cars is Toyota's technique. We would still call them an auto manufacturer and refer to this as a market, at least casually.

Most social media (and also netflix, spotify... so maybe just "media) is feed driven. The anchor to these feeds is data gathering. The data gathering edge (along with network effects) is what makes a $100bn worth $100bn. It's what makes the product work. A twitter feed, e-commerce specials page or targeted advertising widget that is customised well is an entirely different product to an untargeted generic.

If Tesla pulls off self driving, the difference between Tesla (worth $400b on expectation alone) and any other manufacturer their size (probably >$10bn) will be data.

Data may not be the only thing that will be responsible for self driving, but it is proving to be the limiting factor in many of the most commercially important cases.

So... Your post is a great example on how mixing practices and markets makes everything confusing.

The OP is all about how revenue of marketing companies shouldn't be larger than the revenue of final goods companies. But there is clearly no such restriction on self driving cars, it's a final product all by itself.

If you mix both into a "data gathering market", you have no means at all to analyze it.

That's how we get to blackboard economics. These business models are related and interlinked. You can't separate them and still have a good model of reality.

Data is constantly growing new uses, which can go from economically marginal to central very quickly. Data gathering just isn't something that is a distinct market all on its own. The same dataset could feasibly power an ad widget, recommendation playlist or whatever.

All your examples involved paying for something

This is my point. Paying for something does not mean that you are not being spied on or advertised to.

I'm contradicting the (harmful) trope that the reason ad centric data monopolies spy on us is because we refuse to pay. This just isn't true. They do it regardless.

Fairly sure with the advent of the web, Google were the first to track users on a worldwide scale, via search, adsense, analytics, chrome etc. Facebook soon followed with its popularity.

Both provide free products.

There may be added value for a seller to data collect though, of course.

The amazing thing is that advertisers are willing to pay so much for so little.

The only winners are the data markets.

If ads were blocked and users paid for content, surveillance would be less profitable and so less would be done.

Granted it's hard to coordinate both together, but let's be real: given the choice, 90% of the time users pick ads over paying -- you can see this among the vast majority of muggles who don't even try to ad block (so presumably don't really care about these issues) but still prefer free ad-based websites to paying for subscriptions. People pay for stuff that has a wall around it and can't be easily pirated. (Note: most news we read (measured by page views) is pirated by adware websites after someone published original research.)

Maybe YOU block or just avoid ads and pay for non-spyware stuff, but businesses overall respond to the masses.

Even on the super private ad-restricting expensive iPhone, most users immediately rush to adbacked trash websites.

Blaming my parents for not knowing how to install ad block or that it is even an option, and then expect them to navigate the anti-ad block JavaScript is a bit much.

Exactly! It's even worse than that, because even if your parents did know how to install an ad blocker it would not solve the problem.

Data monopolies are fighting blockers, and the more they're used, the harder they fight.

Pointing the finger at your parents is totally wrong. Your parents aren't at fault, all these damned spyware companies are at fault.

This trite cliche has got to stop. It's both factually incorrect and morally unconscionable.

Totally disagree. First, if users could effectively block advertising and spying, then the problem would be solved regardless of paying. The data monopolies (and would be parts of those monopolies) are actively and effectively combatting blocking.

The "because free" trope is a blackboard theory. It's clearly not true in reality, but people still argue that it's "true in theory." This isn't a theoretical scenario. There are plenty of paid products, and they also spy on us. Echo, android, spotify...

In reality, besides apple, most of the largest fortunes made recently in the tech space are based on advertising, data collection and monopolising the marketplaces, platforms, feeds or pipelines. Even Tesla's insanely high stock price is primarily based on data collection. It's their edge in the autonomous driving race. Teslas aren't free.

Facebook and Google would still spy and advertise because it is far more profitable than selling, and creates a more convenient relationship with "customers." They also spy on their "partners," and were recently fined >$bn for doing so monopolistically.

Anyway, the "adbacked trash websites" aren't the main problem... The main problem are the adbacked empires of Google Facebook & co.

> There are plenty of paid products, and they also spy on us. Echo, android, spotify.

You pay for the Echo/Android device. You aren't paying form Alexa and the Android OS and core apps like Maps. None of this can exist if without some for of using your data for profit. I don't think it's fair to lump Neflix and Spotify into this. Their data collection is directly related to the services they provide like recommendations. IMO it's at the same level of data collection as supermarket rewards cards, which are most people are happy with.

> 90% of the time users pick ads over paying

Or don't get the option. Please make my local newspaper take a subscription for ad-free browsing :)

There are also the times when the subscription is as predatory as the ads, like the traditional US large publishers where you can sign up online but have to call a number and go through marketing to cancel. Those aren't any better than the ads.

The problem of companies abusing privacy and ads is not the issue being discussed. The problem is that most "good" news publishers has no way of making money without churning a lot of low quality content. Currently, the only high quality for-profit news publisher completely immune to this is the Economist, but there isn't much room in that corner of the market.

I was responding to the problem as framed in the comment, which like ads & spyware gets explained with the (imo totally false) assertion that it's because people want free.

I also commented regarding hard journalism, pointing out that the business dichotomy of "quality" content vs entertainment oriented content has always favoured the latter.

Incidentally, I don't even think the Economist quite fits the description. They do mostly "editorial" style content. Commentary, punditry, summaries of recent events. It may be "quality" in literary terms, but it isn't exactly hard journalism in the investigative sense. It isn't really the kind of content that's in jeopardy.

I think it's important to beat back the cliché that "free is the problem." It's often repeated, rarely challenged, taken for granted and factually incorrect.

The financial problems of hard, investigative journalism problem exist regardless of content consumption trends. A quality investigative piece requires seasoned journalists to work for weeks, months or years. The economic value is "just an article." The article doesn't really make more money than a commentary piece that takes an afternoon to write. This is true regardless of business models.

It's fair to point out that the Economist doesn't need to spend money on investigative research. My point is that their content quality hasn't degraded during the social media age. Publishers are willing to spend money on investigation but in order for people to read it, publishers need to package it for consumption, which involves some degree of sensationalization. Social media and the reliance of ad revenue have made this a lot worse.

> The economic value is "just an article."

I think that this is also essentially saying that people want nice things for free (or at a very low cost). I don't think the original commenter is actually trying to blame people for not paying for the news, even if they phrased this point in a more condescending way.

"I think that this is also essentially saying that people want nice things for free (or at a very low cost). I don't think the original commenter is actually trying to blame people.."

My point was that free or unfree are not the issue here. It's just not true, just as its not true about advertising or data gathering. Free isn't what's making a problem. It was a problem before. Whether your business model is eyeballs (it usually is in print, online, paid or free), subscriptions or both the most important types of journalism aren't economical. They're generally produced because journalistic cultures value them. Those that don't generally just become tabloids.

Sending a journalistic team to Yemen to produce 10 articles is much more expensive than having people work from the office and produce 100 articles about politicians' and academics' opinions about that war... or articles about Kim and Kanye. A view is a view, a magazine sale is a magazine sale.

I'm not even sure people "want nice things" in the sense that they want quality journalism. We want them to have "nice things." It's important for society. Doesn't necessarily benefit the reader much.

Good journalism has always been hard to fund and rarely economically sustainable. Nothing to do with "people these days" or with "free."

It's related to FB and Google in a roundabout way. They are the monoliths. They get all the bread. People read the content on FB, and if you don't want to let them then people will read someone else's content. So people read the content on FB, and FB gets the ad money. FB doesn't have a journalistic culture, journalistic ethic, or any kind of ethic. It was the journalistic ethic that was enabling hard journalism to be cross subsidised. That ethic is now broke.

I truly don't understand publishers their negative attitude towards Google News. Everything combined, Google News is a net positive for publishers. They weren't as discoverable as they are now and probably see less traffic from any other source. They want to be compensated for being publicly indexed? Google should honestly just remove the complaining publishers from Google News or Google altogether. See how they like that. Let them opt-out if they dislike it that bad. It's like complaining to a phone book it lists phone numbers in an efficient manner.

What will publishers do with troves of traffic. If the quality of the same is bad.

The discoverablity is subjective. I as user a see the same sites and same topics thanks to "the algorithm".

I don't mean to say publishers don't need Google. It is that now (compared to past) Google's position is much stronger and they dictate terms, publishers are screwed either ways, so better put a fight than now down

I think it is the heavy handed 'do it our way our way or we deplatform you' that publishers do not like. They are in a position where they can make or break someone with a couple of lines in a config file. They have also been playing favorites in their other algs. The content publishers know exactly what is up as they have the analytics to see the drop off when someone tweaks their position. Tossing a billion out there sounds like they want to keep some of their favorites going.

Anything google did to 'unearth' the underlying articles would probably be viewed this way. Are you arguing that not doing anything "news" specific, whether it be a focused search page or news "app", would be preferred?

Can you elaborate on the "playing favorites"?

There's a whole mix of real issues here. Number one for me is that money won't buy quality and its quality we're sorely lacking on "journalism" today.

Money buys quality in almost every other field.

What makes journalism different?

Spot on. My news landscape today is far better than what existed 15 or 20yrs ago. There are new challenges, but also many new solutions. I particularly love things like Substack where journalists can be paid for good content w/o layers of middlemen.

Primary revenue source of journalism is exposure, which is easier to achieve by low quality, emotionally captivating, cookie-cutter garbage - so there's little incentive for changing the business model into one that would support "money buys quality". Related to that is that free-with-ads is essentially an alpha predator among business models; honest businesses can't compete with it - so it's doubly hard for a quality publisher to exit the equilibrium in which the whole industry sits.

In most cases, money buys quality when the person paying cares and can tell. If you can't tell quality, money doesn't buy it (eg used cars for the average buyer). Also, if the person paying isn't the one using the product (or they don't care for some other reason), you stop getting quality (eg government cheese).

Google arnt the ones reading articles so they don't suffer if quality falls. You also can't really quantify quality of journalism can you (of the million articles Google sponsors, which were good?).

There are exceptions to this, the BBC for instance. But on the whole the US is very bad at this and even if it weren't, it's hard to do.

This is also the reason journalism has collapsed in general: when customers paid for stories by buying papers the stories had to be good. But now advertisers are paying for clicks and any journalism that happens is purely co-incidental...

There's also a big issue with censorship and control when Google literally own the news. I'm actually pretty pro Google, but given the amount of grilling they get, it would be really easy to just cancel some stories about them and push some about senators who dislike them etc.

Nobody cares for good journalism when you can make up a story that sounds good and supports your political views. In Germany Class Relotius[1] made a living out of faking and dramatizing his stories, winning several journalism prices before a coworker went against management to uncover it.

[1]https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claas_Relotius

Note: I link the German wikipedia page since the English one only mentions that the Spiegel "was unaware of anyone helping him" while the German one explicitly cites several sources that confirm that dramatization over reality is openly encouraged as a style choice.

Exactly. What makes journalism different is that it comes with middlemen (publishers) taking almost all the profits. Other content creators are starting to find ways to reach their audience in a more direct way. E.g. novelist self publish via the Amazon Store. Vloggers self publish on Youtube. Agents/publishers still get involved but only after proven success and at that point for fair compensation.

There are plenty of independent writers and journalists getting next to nothing because they have no way to monetize other than via these middlemen who pay them pennies per word. Google came along a long time ago and made them a lot less valuable than they used to be by basically becoming the primary distribution channel for stuff that was originally exclusive to their channel.

So, publishers have been slowly losing cash for years and basically most remaining newspapers are shadows of their former self in terms of editorial staffing, in house (i.e. employed) writers producing good content, etc. If you are not e.g. the New York times or one of a handful of other publishers, the value add is diminishing rapidly.

What journalists need is new channels. The smart thing for Google to do would be to compete directly and start paying content creators. That would of course piss everybody off which is why they don't. But it does mean that there is a business model waiting to happen out there for somebody to step up. Google of course did this successfully on Youtube already and it has helped that platform grow without having to license a lot of external content like e.g. Netflix and Amazon Prime have to do.

Some kind of Netflix/Spotify/whatever for news is what is needed. I'd pay for it even. I pay for these things as well but I haven't bought a news paper in more than a decade.

Tell that to the people discussing TV ads on those other threads today.

As a matter of fact, I do have a hard problem to get power supply unities and rechargeable batteries. I just settled on treating those things as semi-disposable, because they all are.

Paying more money is often not sufficient to get more quality, though it may be necessary to get more quality. Without visiting Consumer Reports and digging deep into Reddit, I don't know whether a $2000 refrigerator is better than the $1500 model standing next to it. I'd guess that this situation is more common than knowing that a higher priced product will be a higher quality product.

In the case of newspapers, in-depth investigative reporting was never profitable on its own. Newspapers had geographically limited oligopolies over some common kinds of advertising in the 20th century. They bundled expensive investigative reports with low cost content like sports scores and weather forecasts. They interleaved display ads through all of it. Winning a Pulitzer could raise their prestige but it was revenue from bundled, mostly low cost content that made the business profitable.

Classified advertising was particularly valuable because newspapers charged high rates and had to do no information gathering to fill those pages of the paper. Classified advertisers paid to show ads, and some newspaper buyers purchased the whole bundle just to see those ads. Craigslist was therefore the first big blow against the old newspaper revenue model.

If Google News didn't exist, I believe that some other system would have further eroded the newspaper revenue model. Maybe it would be Reddit's news subreddits, Wikipedia's Current Events portal, or a lightweight "CraigsNews" aggregator. In any case, global discovery and reach online mean that most regional news organizations have fewer, less valuable eyeballs to advertise to than they did in the 20th century.

Google gets blamed because it indexes news and has a lot of money. I don't think that Google has a lot of money because it indexes news. If Google shut down Google News and deindexed every news site, the news organization revenue problem would probably not be any better 5 years from now. The economic inefficiencies and geographic barriers of the 20th century news system produced a few positive externalities that people miss now. Legislators could try to directly fund news from taxes but they can't make people buy a newspaper to get weather forecasts again.

Agreed. This money will only go to the publishers that Google features. Thereby further subsidizing establishment voices.

News.google.com has gone downhill over the past decade. I almost never visit this site anymore. All of the suggested articles are irrelevant to me. Especially the entertainment and 'technology' subheadings. The older site allowed for more personalization.

Google is in the advertising business not in Philantropy.

I believe that the goal here is also to break the existing unity among publishers.

Wow! So much hate on this thread. And not a single reasonable proposal on what newspapers or Google can do to make things more equitable.

Here's a reasonable proposal, they could get off their butts and actually innovate to adapt to a changing market.

It's like they saw Netflix and iTunes and Spotify come up to adapt to the changing media markets and decided that they weren't affected for some magical reason. Now because they're going out of business, they're asking for handouts

Companies reigning themselves in under threats of regulation might be better than actually whacking them with the regulation stick. Regulation has its costs too.

Somebody has to pay for the SOURCE of News; Those who are making money with news should pay first;

So who is making money on news then? A quick google search for "trump has coronavirus" shows some news articles and no advertisements whatsoever. Going to the news tab shows more articles and still no advertisements and I cannot recall ever seeing an ad when searching for news so it doesn't look like google is making money from their search engine on news to me.

Google search didn't start out with ads either. It's part of why we moved from Altavista et al to Google..

Google News is still in hot waters with various governments. It's too early to start monitizing it.

Google News has been around since 2002 and I don't think it has ever shown ads.

This is about Google keeping people on their site and forestalling regulatory fines. The only more aggressive behavior would be to create a non-profit company that distributes the money, then make all payments as donations to that company. Publishers may hardly ever see any money on an individual publisher basis.

Interesting that it's $2B/3yr and not $.35B/1yr or $1.3B/4yr.

That $1B is magic number.

Aside: I think about this kind of thing a lot, and the answer is always "because humans have 10 digits on their hands". The world is strange.

Paying the Danegeld, etc.

Isn't PR the product news publishers provide?

Edit: previous title was "Google is giving $1B to publishers. For PR, not a product."

Pretty much. Paul Graham's article on the topic:

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Google: don't don't be evil

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