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Comment by ricardo81 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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