Hacker News Reader

Set your robots.txt appropriately if you don't want to show up in Google.

If I want my website to show preferentially in Google, I have to pay them. But oh no, we can't have the same rules for journalists as we do for us regular folk.

They want Google to pay them for sending traffic to their sites. This is not the way the world works.

View on HN

They actually like being featured on Google News and Facebook's news sections. They just want to be paid for it, or else force the tech giants to redirect traffic to them, directly. But as long as Google et.al. have the ability to walk away from the deal, they will exercise it, since they know the newspaper will feel more pain from the separation than the they will.

This is a flagrant money grab and no more. Years before social media existed these outlets loved the free traffic from aggregators like the drudge report. They just don't see a huge money pit there that they can go after.

I don't understand why the tech companies haven't fought back harder against this extortion. YouTube even explicitly favors "authoritative" sources which is basically the companies trying to extort them here. Why don't they just drop them from their platform?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com