Going after Google
OK, this is more news media side than entertainment side, but the bottom line is the same. We’re delighted to see that a major figure in the content generation world has figured out that you can’t earn revenue from “free.”
That it’s a figure at News Corp., which owns Fox, makes it even better. But it’s about time someone major understood that the net is not always our friend.
A snippet:
The gloves are coming off in the intensifying battle between newspaper publishers and Google.
In a keynote speech at the annual PricewaterhouseCoopers Entertainment and Media Outlook event Tuesday, Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton raised the rhetoric a notch, calling the Internet search giant a vampire “sucking the blood†out of the newspaper business, and promised that new developments would level the playing field.
This makes zero sense to me.
On my Google homepage I’ve got modules for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. Headlines from those services are regularly updated and if they interest me, then I click on them and go to their websites.
If it weren’t for Google, I’d likely visit at most one of those sites, and do so infrequently. Google is the greatest source of free advertising they have.
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Admin. Response – Sorry, Steve, but you’re off target. It’s not free advertising – you don’t buy a thing from any of those publications. Instead, you take it for nothing, and they get zero revenue from your use. Try paying the staff of a newspaper or a tv show with your “nothing” contribution. Try making a profit. It doesn’t work.
Google isn’t advertising anything. It’s leeching, and the blood loss is killing the newspaper industry first…and we’re next….OK, maybe we’re second in line, behind television news.
I’m going to take Steve’s side on this, in that the origin of the problem is what the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and the BBC are doing in the first place by throwing their content on the web for all to see.
Historically, the claim has been that advertising appearing on these web sites would help support the news organizations. In practice, that hasn’t happened.
So the news organizations could do what the Wall Street Journal has done, and make most of the content subscription-only. Or they could put it out for free, as most metropolitan dailies have done. Or they could take down their web sites and depend on physical newspaper sales.
In all of these scenarios, I simply fail to see how Google is the villain. If all they are doing is indexing and delivering headlines that lead back to the original site, it seems like if could only help. It’s only if we think that the Google headlines are a complete substitute for visiting the sites that the argument starts to have merit. And in that case it only has merit if we think that most people would take the trouble to visit every site that is summarized on Google. Steve has said that he wouldn’t, and I believe him, because I wouldn’t either.
I’m interested to know what Hinton considers to be the playing-field-leveling idea that will counteract whatever the problem is. As long as the content is on the web for free, and unless there is a profound (and unlikely) change in the law, I don’t see it.
VG
Say what?
The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and BBC INTENTIONALLY put their web pages online. Google sends me to the web pages those companies PUBLISH.
If the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and BBC did not want me to see those web pages I take it they would not publish them — although perhaps I’m mistaken and some mysterious cabal of news ninjas is holding the owners of those companies families hostage and forcing them to have web presences.
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Admin. Comment: Sorry – but while they want you to see them and yes, they published them, they didn’t publish them on google’s aggregation service. Google simply scrapes them from the original site.
When google takes them, there’s no payment to the producer. There’s no advertising revenue to the content producer. It’s just leeching. Sure, it’s great for the consumer, who gets the content free. But we think that just like the networks, the producers of news content are in the process of discovering that making content available for free on the web is a suicidal business model. That’s what the Wall Street Journal’s editor seemed to be saying – and he’s right.
It’s the same problem we face with new media. You can’t give it away and pay the people who produce it at the same time.
I don’t think Google is the villain….it,s us, the consumers who now demand for free what we used to pay for. Why should I buy a copy of the NY TImes if I can read their stories online?….or Variety…or The Reporter?…. Why would we pay for a whole CD of music when we can just buy one track…or, if I search a little, find it for free from a friend?…and the same goes for our industry.
Why would a consumer pay $$$ to got to a theater to watch a film 1x, when they can buy the DVD, or find a ‘copy’ or watch online for free?
The mistake here is industries are the dog’s wagging tail. If all these services (new, music, movies) only offered subscription service online – and took the time and money to find a process that will prevent a consumer from copying the product and giving it to friends free – then the issue would be very different.
The internet has changed everything…and too fast for anyone to really know how to create a new, workable and profitable business model.
Admin,
You’ve identified the right problem, but the wrong villain, and until you realize that no one will ever be able to compete in the marketplace with “free” or what looks like “free,” complaining about Google will get you nowhere.
The WSJ claims to be one of the few content providers who have a successful subscription based Web business. For three years, I was counted among their online subscribers although I stopped paying for the service. Counting me in was clearly more important than getting my money. I now get the hard-copy delivered to my doorstep, which I enjoy because I can sit on my patio with my paper and use it to brush the gnats and mosquitos away, something I would not suggest you try with a Kindle. I am getting the paper on a “one time only” introductory rate that has been extended three times. I have no doubt that if my subscription ever expires, I will still have access to the online premium content for years after that.
Google doesn’t cause problems for the WSJ, because their content was already largely available for free online before Google appeared. It took a couple extra clicks to find, but it was just as accessable when Dogpile was my search engine of choice. Google just streamlined the process.
The advance of technology, and the failure to embrace it, has caused the failure of the old business models of the newspaper industry, as it is crushing the old business models of the music industry and as it will eventually do to the old business models of the TV and movie industry. Google is the point of the knife held to the throat of these businesses, it is NOT the hand holding the knife.
In the future, will there be a need for reasoned, objective, “professional” news gathering and reporting? Most certainly. Those who point to the Twitter phenomenon from the streets of Iran as the future of journalism are overlooking the terrible signal to noise ratio of those messages. It is far more exciting than it is accurate.
People are going to want to hear and/or read real news from reliable outlets. People are also going to want to see and hear professionally performed entertainment. You Tube is fun, but how many skateboarding dogs can you sit through at one time? To make a profit at providing that news or entertainment that will otherwise be available for free, you will either have to find a way to make people want to pay a premium for it (the bottled water model) or make people think they are getting it for free (the internet “tax” model.
Entertainment has an advantage that news does not in terms of charging a premium, because, in many cases, the “presenter” is just as important, if not more important than what is “presented.” Brian Williams and Katie Couric tell essentially the same story at the same time, and no one really wants to see them tell the same story the next day. On the other hand, watching Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video is a lot more captivating over a longer period of time (over twenty five years in this case) than watching a video of two guys play the same song on their cellphones.
Make the viewing experience interactive and charge for the new experience. Set up multiple cameras during a performance and let the individual viewer choose the angle.
You want to keep the focus on Eric Clapton’s hands through a whole song? You can, if you pay for it.
You want to keep your camera on Salma Hayek even when someone else is speaking? Pay for it, and she will fill your screen as long as you pay for.
Do what a lot of musicians have done in the past few years; provide special access for a price. The very talented singer-songwriter Thea Kilgore is launching her own website where, for an annual subscription of about $85, you not only get access to her blog and occasional live Q&A sessions, you get (by vote) to pick a song for her next CD. You get ticket preference for her shows. You get named in print on her next CD. You get to suggest a song you would like her to cover.
I think her charge is kind of high, but she’s locking in a loyal fanbase, and she’s going to make money at it.
It’s a very promising model for actors, but perhaps not as solo performers like Kilgore. Why can’t a group of performers create a digital rep company to produce both the classics and experimental works that might be better framed in a 2″ square screen? It wouldn’t only be a place to hone skills, it would be a way of staking a claim to the economic possibilities of the Internet. The group could sell subscriptions. In return for the money, the subscribers get to see, and participate in, live interviews with the cast, the writers, the directors. Maybe they get a streamed rehearsal or two. Maybe they get free DVDs of performances.
Imagine the potential of a digital Steppenwolf or a mini-La Mama, or a web-based Guthrie. New works, new actors, new format, new horizons.
Or, instead, you can complain that Google is killing you.
SAG and AFTRA could facilitate this kind of experiment. The contracts that would permit productions like this are already in place, but the unions are a natural locus for bringing people together and connecting with the technical staffs and facilities to pull this off on a shoestring to start. Coordination with the other crafts shouldn’t begin and end with figuring out what to demand in the next contract cycle, but even if that is your goal, imagine how much stronger the arguments will be if you already have an good idea, based on real experience, of what works in that environment.
Google does presage the end of information gathering and dissemination as we know it. However, that doesn’t mean there won’t be anything to replace it, or that there won’t be ways to make money in the brave new world.
Quit complaining and figure it out.
I guess I’m still puzzled as to why it’s OK for a consumer to “scrape” (view) the content from a news site but it’s not OK for Google to do so.
Granted, Google benefits from the indexing it does because it draws eyeballs to Google’s page. But I have to return to the point that Steve keeps trying to make: Why are the news organizations putting the content out for free in the first place? If the reason is to draw people to the news organizations’ web pages, and if a listing on Google tends to draw people to those pages, exactly where is the harm?
As I wrote earlier, I see harm only if the Google headlines act as a complete substitute for the visits to the news organizations’ pages. And to demonstrate that, you would have to show that a large number of people would otherwise have made regular visits to the news organizations’ pages in order to see what news was there. I believe only a small number of news junkies would do that. I further believe that the Google headlines are more likely to lure casual readers who wouldn’t regularly check the news organizations’ pages, but might follow a particular headline that had special interest. Since the casual reader wouldn’t even know about the headline without Google, and therefore wouldn’t have visited the news organization’s page otherwise, it is a net gain for the news organization.
What it resembles most to me is doctors subscribing to magazines and making them available in the waiting room. The doctors are exploiting the magazines’ content for their own benefit, namely, keeping their waiting patients amused while waiting to be called in for their appointments. From the magazines’ standpoint, however, it is “giving away” the magazine content to these patients, who no longer will need to buy the magazines since they have already read them in the waiting room. The same thing could be said about libraries and their magazine subscriptions.
Even though using pejorative terms like “scrape” for what Google is doing makes it sound really bad, I don’t think it adds even a gram of weight to the argument. The news organizations have put their content up on wide-open, publicly accessible web sites, requiring only (in a few cases) free registration in order to view it. They seem to be arguing that only “rightful” viewers should be allowed to look at this content. But this starts to sounds like MF’s argument about SAG’s “rightful” jurisdiction. From that standpoint, AFTRA is “scraping” shows from SAG, and should just knock it off. But the argument there runs into the same problems.
I don’t in any way want to minimize the devastating effect that the digital world has on the economics of all traditional media. It’s like the classic example from Property Law class: Farmers won’t plant and nurture fields of corn unless they have the right to harvest the corn and appropriate its value to themselves. Once valuable intellectual property is in digital form, it is in peril, because it is very difficult to protect the right of appropriation.
I certainly concur that it’s difficult to earn revenue from “free,” although the over-the-air broadcast television world has been doing so since the 1950s. And it did so in the presence of TV Guide magazine, which “scraped” the broadcast schedules and presented them to its subscribers without sharing any revenue from magazine subscriptions or magazine advertising with the broadcasters.
So I continue to be bewildered as to the precise nature of Google’s misdeeds here.
VG
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Admin. Response – When Google scrapes the material, it replaces it on a page without the advertising. It simply lifts the content, blocks the ad and gives away the organization’s product without paying the content creator.
It’s not the same as free over the air – that’s paid for by ads which the consumer can choose not to see…but which the advertisers pay to air. Advertisers do pay to appear on newspaper websites, but if you view the content through a Google page, the ad isn’t part of the deal.
It’s not indexing that’s a problem. If all Google did was give you a link to the newspaper’s page with the ad on it, no harm no foul. But when they present their own page with the content and you don’t go to the original content page – then the newspaper gets ripped off.
I wholeheartedly agree. The news organizations have diminished themselves by freely giving away their content on the internet. I haven’t purchased a paper in years because it is all free online.
These organizations seem to be looking for blame elsewhere. It’s their own fault for giving it away in the first place.
The demise of the newspaper is not the fault of the internet – it’s the fault of the newspapers.
Google doesn’t cause problems for the WSJ …
I’d just like to mention that the WSJ allows redirects from Google to display paid content for free. Anyone can do this simply by prepending
http://www.google.com/url?q=
to a WSJ link. Of course, the WSJ could easily have this deliver the same few lines of a report non-subscribers receive via the direct link. Calling Google a ‘digital vampire’ instead seems disingenuous to me…
Dr. Giggles NAILED IT when he said:
“The internet has changed everything…and too fast for anyone to really know how to create a new, workable and profitable business model.”
Wild-ass guessing on where it will all go is a high risk game not for the faint of heart. Consumer trends rise and fall at lightning speed these days and today’s Hulu could become tomorrow’s BetaMax in the blink of an eye. Hard to see how it will pay, and even hard to find a way to keep content from being shared for free.
“The internet has changed everything…and too fast for anyone to really know how to create a new, workable and profitable business model.â€
Too fast? The “World Wide Web” is now about 15 years old. Or, if you must blow off the first few years, I have some friends in the massive bandwidth content delivery business who’ve been raking in the money for about ten years now.
Long ago some friends and I bought a small radio station in Tucson. The economy there at the time was about as bad as it is for the whole country now. I’ll never forget what an auto parts shop owner told me when I suggested he hold a sale to generate some business. “The hardest thing is the world is getting people to pay the regular price again once the sale’s over…” But, it is not impossible, either.
I’m quite confident there is plenty of money to be made here, even though I personally can’t offer much in the way of ideas regarding exactly how…
iTunes is one obvious good example. It has been extremely successful, I believe primarily due to A) having what people want, and B) not over-charging them for it. The record companies may not be thrilled with the pricing, but I think they should be. I certainly am with my own royalty earnings from it, and they get a much larger piece of it than I… Apple is, by the way, very close to sinking about $1 billion into another data center, a good part of which will be serving iTunes.
So. I mentioned this discussion to my content delivery pals, and they thought you’d all enjoy this video clip, from 1981 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WCTn4FljUQ&fmt=18
Note well the eight newspapers listed as participants:
1. The Columbus Dispatch
2. The New York Times
3. Virginian-Pilot & Ledger-Star
4. The Washington Post
5. The San Francisco Chronicle
6. The San Francisco Examiner
7. The Los Angeles Times
8. Minneapolis Star and Tribune