Google CEO Warns Newspapers Not To Anger Readers 328
Barence writes "Google CEO Eric Schmidt has hit back at newspaper bosses, warning them that they risk alienating readers in their war against news aggregators such as Google News. 'I would encourage everybody to think in terms of what your reader wants,' Schmidt said at a conference for the Newspaper Association of America. 'These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.' Schmidt's rebuke follows a sustained attack on Google by newspaper bosses such as Rupert Murdoch, who have accused the search giant of 'stealing' their content without payment."
Schmidt also suggested that newspapers need to expand their distribution methods to make better use of mobile technology, and a NY Times piece argues that the Associated Press' struggle against aggregators is futile since they're largely trying to give news stories to consumers for free anyway.
Dirty Schmidt (Score:5, Funny)
"Being as this is Google, the most powerful media aggregator in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"
Eric Schmidt's
Guardian wants free money from Google (Score:3, Funny)
The Guardian Media Group has asked the Government to examine Google News and other content aggregators [today.com], claiming they contribute insufficiently to their income.
"The newspapers put their content up on the web for free and then Google, the freeloading bastards, tell people where to find it. We told them to pay up or stop using our stuff, and they said OK, they'd stop using our stuff! Not giving us free money is a clear abuse of Google's power.
"We need the Government to bring back balance, 'balance' defined as being able to make them give us money because we want it. You'd think the Internet wasn't invented to give newspapers and record companies free money!"
The newspaper group argues that traffic from search engines does not make up the cost of producing the content. "Ad revenue has collapsed, so search engine traffic doesn't bring in enough views to pay for itself. Our inability to sell ads is clearly Google's problem. It's also the BBC's problem, so we should get some of the TV licencing fee too."
The Guardian suggests the exploration of new models that "require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site through advertising and 'at the edges' in the world of search and aggregation. Basically, they should just give us money because we want it. And the music industry too. How about a bailout? Go on, gi's it."
Re:Yeah this reader's _____ (Score:4, Funny)
Sometime tune into Fox News just for the hell of it
< 5 minutes will verify this statement
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:3, Funny)
spending 20 minutes of a computer analysts time to put a proper robots.txt file up
HTML jockeys are calling themselves "computer analysts" now? Christ!
Next thing I know, people are going to start referring to Cascading Style Sheets as "code."
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:3, Funny)
Force Google to remove your content, and stop spidering it again, then watch as your online readership instantly drops to zero.
Fixed.
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:5, Funny)
The Parent and GP are missing the point. Publishers want their content in Google News -- they just want Google to pay them for it.
*WHAM!*
That's the sound of the hammer connecting with the nailhead.
Re:Google Lawyer Alexander Macgillivray's Blog (Score:3, Funny)
*WHAM!*
That's the sound of the hammer connecting with the nailhead.
*KAPLUNG*
That's the sound of Batman's fist connecting with the Joker's face.