Why Bite the Google Hand That Feeds You? 192
Techdirt pointed out that not long ago, John Byrne, ex-editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com and now CEO of newly founded C-Change Media, decided to tackle the problem of why publications seem to be so vehemently opposed to Google being a part of their business process. While there aren't any earth-shattering revelations, it is a great, succinct description of the problem. "I received several solid answers from followers of this blog, including Frymaster who immediately took sides in the ongoing war between Traditional Media and Google. Wrote Frymaster: 'I reject out-of-hand the assertion that Google is profiting from others' content. Rather, I say that Google profits from connecting users to content. It is a service that most web publishers appreciate greatly. Google, unlike any other search engine ever, goes to great pains to deliver the least-skewed results possible. Google is constantly on the hunt for people who game their system. That's why they succeed. There is a direct connection between Google's user-centric, community-oriented approach and their financial success.'"
Wait, let me see if I got this right (Score:5, Insightful)
If you make a product people like and don't piss off people while making them want to use something else... they'll use your product?
STOP THE PRESSES!
Re:Wait, let me see if I got this right (Score:5, Insightful)
If you worked for any length of time in or with big business, you'd be surprised to find that someone is actually saying "the emperor has no clothes on".
It may seem like common sense, but there are reasons why Officespace and Dilbert are so popular. In some cases truth is stranger than fiction.
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The psychic burden we bear for this is unimaginable.
Wow! Imagine that...
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What's so wrong about improving your character , just because you want to be a better person ?
The important thing is to want it yourself , and not be told by someone else ( people don't change because other people want them too , they change because they want too ) .
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( people don't change because other people want them too , they change because they want too ) .
people do change, especially when they think they're dying or would rather be dead. i changed a lot mostly what i needed to come from inside, but that inside change took place in a stint in the nut house, 5 hospitals and 7 or more stays in hospitals did force change on me. i still decided the type of change. then again i did come back to slashdot, so perhaps forced change has it's limits. anyways its the holida
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Because they are the wrong kind of people those publishers want (ie something that makes them money), but they also don't want to give content away for free.
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Pretty much. They'd much rather people buy print ads, because print ads pay about ten times as much as online ads. The trouble is, they haven't made the next logical realisation, that that's why people aren't buying print ads much any more.
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It isn't as simple concept as just "give away free content, make lots and lots of money by advertising", even if everyone always assumes so.
Re:Wait, let me see if I got this right (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't have local monopolies so much any more, so the print ad rates and sales are through the floor. They're blaming Google rather than the existence of the Internet itself.
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Like TFS said: No earth-shattering revelations.
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Of course stop the presses - they're quickly going obsolete.
Just as Google will also go obsolete within 20 years as technology evolves to the point where we don't need centralized "gate-keepers" to tell us what we should be downloading. The network then WILL be the computer, and the computer will be the network. Content producers will communicate direc
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And by "most people" you mean "yourself".
Forgot a bit (Score:2, Insightful)
Or if they do have a news site that they like, they subscribe to its headlines via RSS and only actually visit it to read articles which seem worthwhile.
The only problem with this is when the newspapers compare it with their old business model, where everyone had to buy a whole newspaper in order to be able to skim it for the interesting stuff.
A bit similar to "the album is dead" phenomenon which has hit the music industry.
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Most people go to Google News and probably just skim the headlines, while relatively few people bother to click the link and read the full article.
Google has no ads on that page, so they're not clicking ad links there either.
rd
Capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is like a market maker. Some people despise market makers, but they are ignorant of how trade works. Does the market maker profit from the trades of others? Yes, but without him there would be much less trade, and everyone would be worse off.
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But these news outfits all want to be that market maker. Like TFA says, its all about building brand image as the trusted source. Right now, people trust Google, not the media outlets. There are two problems (from the POV of 'old media') with this situation:
No shit, Sherlock? ^^ (Score:2)
TFS/TFA just says, what everybody on the net is repeating since the beginning of it all. Including pretty much every commenter here on Slashdot.
But now it’s all news, because a site that PHBs read mentiones it?
Are we PHBs, or what?
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TFS/TFA just says, what everybody on the net is repeating since the beginning of it all. Including pretty much every commenter here on Slashdot.
But now it’s all news, because a site that PHBs read mentiones it? Are we PHBs, or what?
A respectable PHB chooses good people who understand their field and then listens to their advice. Such a boss would already be knowledgable about such issues if they are relevant to the business. Unfortunately, those bosses seem to be in the minority and many of their peers were simply promoted to their level of incompetence. To answer your question, we generally are not PHBs, but most of us have to deal with them. Getting the word out to them in a form that they accept as credible is far better than n
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No, we're PHPs and the rest are Pythons
Untrue. Some of us are Perls before swine.
... And we want you off our lawn.
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We are Employoos
Publications love Google (Score:5, Insightful)
They send you traffic, for free, and set up advertising to make you money.
Papermongers hate google, because no one wants their wares anymore, much as I'm sure horse breeders hated Henry Ford.
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Papermongers hate google, because no one wants their wares anymore, much as I'm sure horse breeders hated Henry Ford.
And those that are liked are probably reached directly by means of a bookmark.
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I don't use Google News often (I use a RSS reader), so maybe I have this entirely wrong, but: News only displays a few sentences of the article and the headline. Each story is linked to the original source newspaper. That seems like a fair amount of content to quote in order to drive traffic to the individual newspaper sites.
Some links go to
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And what's in it for the newspapers that provide ALL the content on news.google.com ? Many people never move off that page. Where's their ads? Where's their revenue?
I've seen a few articles like that. I would expect it's a business relationship between Google and the news provider, perhaps splitting ad revenue. The news provider was not a news site, it was a news feed service as I recall.
rd
advertising is the thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Google does not deliver the package of ads with gratuitous attractive content supplied by traditional media. While this has as much to do with online delivery as google, google has first go at ads, in the search results, which tends to decouple any matching that may be done on the article level.
In effect, google completely breaks the traditional mass advertising model. Traditional media realizes this, which is why they are rebelling. The problem is that some traditional media thinks it can replace the ad model with a fully paid subscriber model. I don't think it can. There has to be a way for traditional media to co-exist with search engines,and this is the challenge. The companies that can innovate the ad model will be the companies that get out in tact. The others that just complain about all the money that is being stolen by google will likely be on those lame shows where losers complain about the government taking their jobs,and how socialism is ruining the country.
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Please, bring up Google News [google.com] and count the ads on that page.
I don't do Google searches looking for news, nor does anyone I know. If I'm just keeping tabs on the news I sequence through the awesome bar: google news, ars, el reg, /. and the rest, with a sprinkling of the bbc or whathaveyou when there's time.
In all cases where I'm looking for content traditionally served by media publishers , the only ads I see are on the publishers' sites, not Google's.
Google doesn't show ads when you're looking for movi
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really if paper publishers had any sense they would see google as a chance to reduce costs and increase readership and advertising sales.
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Google IS the model (Score:2)
You just don't understand what google is doing.
I quote: "Google does not deliver the package of ads with gratuitous attractive content supplied by traditional media."
Google's content is, "an answer to your question".
It's not movies.
It's not music.
It's not political commentary.
It's an answer to the question, where do I find ___.
The essential problem, the reason for revolt, is that on google, THE ADVERTISING CONFLICTS WITH THE CONTENT.
Maybe you want to buy a honda. But here's this nissan ad, and you click on
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Another example: I want my users to type in my domain and drill down to pages. This gets me maybe 3 or 4 pageviews.
Coming in straight from google gets me one pageview.
See how this could get someone upset?
On the other hand, that one pageview will be of what the user wants so they are likely to keep looking at it for a while and they will think about the content. All those other views from the other model were representative of users' frustration, of things that were in the way of users getting what they want. That means that that one view is more a more valuable one to you as it represents a more satisfied (and receptive to advertisements) consumer of your content.
If you truly think that pageviews are a meas
Yahoo News (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess they realize there is more money in going after Google than there is in Yahoo.
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Yahoo News actually hires reporters and correspondents to write large amounts of original content. Google purely indexes the works of others. That's a big difference.
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Probably because Yahoo News isn't an aggregator?
They write their own articles, and license content from AP and Reuters, just like any printed paper does. There's no reason publishers should be upset about that, since it's the same thing they're doing-- until recently I'd say the only difference is the lack of a printing press, but now a lot of previously printed papers are online-only too.
Screw Google. (Score:4, Insightful)
Google is utterly evil as far as I am concerned. Why? Because they are in league with the worst people in existence: advertisers. Advertisers have ruined just about every great thing I have ever liked.
Remember when magazines had more content than ads? No longer. In fact, they purposefully don't put page numbers on the ad pages so you are forced to page through them to try to find the fucking articles.
Remember when TV shows only had 2 minutes of commercials? Now they have almost 10 minutes or so, and that doesn't include the logos and ticker/pop-up advertisements during the shows themselves...
Remember when cable had no commercials at all?
Remember when radio stations regularly had half hour to hour long blocks of uninterrupted music?
Remember when the internet wasn't a bunch of fucking pop-ups, banners, and flash crap? In fact, remember when the net was more like a library than a TV?
I even remember a time when my e-mail was just that and not a bunch of spam. Besides, my dick is rock hard and I don't want a Rolex so STFU already.
Even Google itself has been getting steadily worse as well over the years with searches returning less and less pertinent results.
I swear, the day a Minority Report type ad assaults me at the mall, I'm going to go postal. I can only take so much before I have to start making ear necklaces out of these bastards.
In every case the product has gotten worse, not better due to advertising influence. You would think with all that income it would be otherwise, but not so.
I've finally blocked google and all their accomplices from my home network to the degree that I am able and I don't care in the slightest if certain sites fail due to lack of advertising income. The internet is like an information based RAID array. Another site will just take their place and fill the void until it too fails and the cycle repeats.
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Remember when the internet wasn't a bunch of fucking pop-ups, banners, and flash crap? In fact, remember when the net was more like a library than a TV?
Adblock [mychromeaddons.com] / Flashblock [chromespot.com]
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To expand on that relative to GP's bickering, as an adblock/flashblock/noscript user I do appreciate reasonably balanced advertising. The only cost is my eyeballs, and sometimes the information is actually useful.
Newspaper advertising is too expensive relative to the value it provides. This is dangerous for newspapers and sites like Monster where they have long been able to charge a significant premium due to limited access.
If they want to be able to charge a premium (relative to Craigslist), they had bette
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I don't see any ads at the top of search results. Am I blind? All I see are useful links to other sections of Google I can search with, like images, which I use quite often.
It depends on what you search for. If you were to search for "used car" then you can bet there would be ads. If you were to search for "clojure rexx comparison" then there wouldn't (I've just checked).
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Re:Screw Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, how dare websites be economically viable.
The Wallstreet Journal, Slashdot, Google, Youtube, Facebook, and the smaller (and much smaller) websites should be free to view AND advertising free.
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You're right, how dare websites be economically viable.
The Wallstreet Journal, Slashdot, Google, Youtube, Facebook, and the smaller (and much smaller) websites should be free to view AND advertising free.
Nobody said anything of the sort. If I'm getting a product for free, I don't mind the inclusion of many ads because I understand someone's gotta pay the piper. Similarly, I don't mind paying a subscription fee for a quality publication that has at most a handful of ads. For example, I happily subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.
What annoys me is when the publisher double-dips by charging me a hefty subscription fee AND then provides a product that's more advertising than substance.
For example, I pay a si
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I think you underestimate the value of an established community and the cost of operating a large community site. If slashdot folded, yeah, people would go somewhere else. But that site (or those sites) has (have) to be able to afford the traffic that results. You can't just wave your hands, sprinkle some magic free software pixie dust, and declare that the community will just go to another totally free site. That site will fold too, and eventually there won't be any. For something like youtube... it t
+1 Mod parent up (Score:2)
+1 Mod parent up. A+++ WOULD BUY AGAIN
(By the way, I gave up ads on my news site when I realised that I was taking 1/120 of the money I made working for a living in order to shove FLOATING FUCKING BANNERS in my friends' faces. WTF.)
Re:Screw Google. (Score:4, Insightful)
Alright, you don't like Google because of their use of advertising. Fair enough.
So - how much would you be willing to pay to use a search engine that doesn't use advertising to finance their running costs?
Also, would you rather use one that takes money from companies, but doesn't show advertisements and instead bump those companies' websites, or one that tries to return relevant search results and advertisements next to it?
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Before the Internet became widespread, high schools and libraries had to pay big dollars ($20 a query, as well as a monthly fee) so they would have dialup access to a database that would search for sources. Usually you had to be *very* good at phrasing, else you would get absolutely nothing relevant (as the database only would show the first 20-30 hits), and have to do another expensive query with better terms.
Do we want to go back to this model, where we would have to subscribe to a paywall to keep Google
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It should have no advertising, and it should have no corporate sponsorship, and it should be accountable to the public. It should also b
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Ok, usually I'm pretty liberal and think that the government can (and should) provide some services where it makes sense that only one ent
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Excellent! If it's competitive, what does it matter if we were to add one more taxpayer funded competitor? Think of it like having the BBC available on TV. You sound a little worried ?
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Advertisers have ruined just about every great thing I have ever liked.
Then you should patronize only businesses that don't advertise.
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"Then you should patronize only businesses that don't advertise."
Yep. I wish him luck. Because I know of no such businesses.
Businesses advertise because it works.
And frankly if advertising has destroyed every great thing in your life, your life is pathetic. The phrase "Get a life" comes to mind.
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Advertisers have ruined just about every great thing I have ever liked.
Then you should patronize only businesses that don't advertise.
Name five?
Can't take the bus, can't ride the public roads, can't even use a motor vehicle. Can't shop for groceries, can't eat any food that is sold... seriously, mr free market solution, how do you actually accomplish something like that?
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Ding, ding! Congratulations, you got my point.
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seriously, mr free market solution, how do you actually accomplish something like that?
that might have been his point.
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Easy. First stop: the store that's not only notorious for NOT advertising, but for banning anyone who so much as mentions them on the web: T---
Hey, wait a minute.
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Congratulations on slowly getting to the point that everybody else figured out right away.
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Based, seemingly, on a very rose colored remembrance of days past.
Nostalgia = brain rot (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is this:
1. Print advertising makes ten times as much per buyer than online advertising.
2. No-one much is buying print advertising any more.
The papers are no good at selling print ads any more, so they blame the supplier of online ads. i.e., anyone other than themselves.
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Here's the problem with print ads, and why they're failing:
* First, there's an intrinsic cycle cost to the advertising company (ie, the papers and magazines): they've got to print a paper.
* Second, they've got no way to provide metrics to their users, short of their users communicating where they heard about the company/product/etc. in person.
* Third, most print ads are of a limited distribution due to the niche interest of the media; a locally pertinent newspaper, a special interest magazine (Pet Times, Fi
Oversimplified ... (Score:2)
You have to distinguish the Google functionality that provides search results and leads users to the content owner's website from the various Google projects that incorporate - in "corporate" terms you'd say "steal" - sufficient content for the user's needs and only provide a link to the owner for further information. For example, most users only read short summaries of news articles - so they never click on the link to the content owner's pages when they can read that on Google News. Or look at blatantly s
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We all love Google Search, but could do without Google the content aggregator who monetizes everyone else's content.
They show a couple of lines with the search terms highlighted. When you click on the link you're taken to the news site.
Is there anybody here complaining that actually uses Google? And complaining about little text ads to the side of the page?
rd
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google follows robots.txt if any producer actually believes that their content is so worthless that people won't read more than the first 2 sentences.
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Wisdom of the Strong (Score:2)
As I have watched this situation unfold, I keep thinking of something I read once. "A wise (powerful?) man keeps his friends close and his enemies closer." I tried Machiavelli, and Sun Tzu but can't quite find it. If Google is bringing them readers who will click on ads, then they are a friend and should be kept close, or in the loop. If Google is truly breaking their business model the choices are even clearer. Quit whining and lure Google into the castle, close the door and win; or just go to war and dest
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> "A wise (powerful?) man keeps his friends close and his enemies
> closer." I tried Machiavelli, and Sun Tzu but can't quite find it.
Try Mario Puzo. I am fairly sure that was in The Godfather (the book, I mean -- it was certainly in the movie).
some moderate views (Score:2)
This being slashdot, I can predict that there will be lots of people modding each other up for saying that news should be free, comparing newspapers to manufacturers of buggy whips, etc. Actually the positions of both google and the traditional print media are a lot more nuanced than that, so it might be worth considering whether they actually know their own business better than slashdotters do. This [yahoo.com] article (not paywalled!) has a nice, up-to-date discussion of the issues. Google is trying to work out a com
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The point is that for 99% of news sites out there, Goggle is the way (non-local) people find them. As in, visitors. Block them out and reduce your exposure, I am sure advertiser would flock to that idea.
Leaving out the middle man might sound fine in theory, but... would Coca-Cola sell as much of their products if people had to go to Atlanta, Georgia to buy them?
"High-quality reporting" will be there if there is a market for it, regardless of business model. But often it is the "citizen reporting" that drive
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Editorial work isn't free. Sending reporters to Afghanistan isn't free. Yes, they can get some revenue from advertising, but possibly not enough to support high-quality reporting if it's the sole source of revenue.
There's more advertising than content in the paper, I don't want to pay to be advertised to.
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The model they seem to have in mind is that articles will be indexed by google, and users will be able to click through to the articles for free after finding them in a google search, but newspapers will still be able to keep users from effectively getting a free subscription without paying for a subscription.
Both things you said are true. This is slashdot, and they are modding each other just as you said they would. Also, the Google plan to mollify Murdoch and others is as you describ
Blame it on the ad desk. (Score:2)
I've worked pretty hard to pull away from the mainstream dead-pulp press sites unless they offer a variety of features I think are necessary:
1. No login, but if I do voluntarily create an account, I should get some advantages (targeted ads would be nice, like Facebook where I can vote on ads)
2. Comments. If the deadpulpsters don't want my input, I don't want theirs.
3. Reasonable variety of facts over what the AP and other wires vomit. Originality counts, even if I disagree with it.
Yet there's another shor
Hey, last generation, adapt or die, k? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Damn I have mod points and I really wanted to mod up the posting directly above yours, but you diatribe must be answered and corrected.
The only thing that has really changed is the distribution model for original content.
The problem that Murdoch and all the others are having is now they have to contend with two distribution models.
The first is the original one, the classic news paper that you buy off the rack or get delivered, which is now going away. Their revenue stream came from selling those papers. Y
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Nicely put. If I dare to quote myself:
The web has done a lot to spread knowledge, but it has also done a lot do destroy knowledge distribution.
What I should have said is, "The web has done a lot to spread knowledge, but it has also done a lot do destroy quality of the knowledge distributed."
So often these days and this is true of /., the content we see is not original journalism, but rather a bad rewrite of bad journalism that was cooked up as you say. They used to send journalists on assignment to the places things were happening and have them stay there for a few days and really scope out what was going on
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What killed the first iteration of mp3.com was the "music locker". This allowed one to read a CD in via some app, and allow playback of a track from their server. They were put down hard and very expensively in the courts by the powers that be, bankrupting the company. Had they kept with their core store model, I'm sure they will either still be in business (a la emusic.com), or bought up by someone else (perhaps Apple for the base of iTMS.)
mp3.com wasn't all evil. Yes, it had some bad policies, but it
Complete the quote (Score:4, Insightful)
You're asking people to accept that they exist at the whim of some other business and through rules that they can't influence or control. Would you put your own business at that level of dependence? Why should a publisher?
Google may be superficially good for a publisher today, but the reality is that they lose influence and control over their own product. They become commodity suppliers to Google, and that's no good to them. It may or may not be good for you-the-consumer, but that's not the viewpoint being argued.
Cheers,
Ian
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News media ALREADY exist at something's whim, that of newsworthy events; at least to the extent they themselves don't create them in order to sell. Ironically, they are themselves a third party between an occurence and the reader interested in it, and they will eventually be replaced by citizen journalism channeled through some future sequel to Twitter or the like. That will be then, sadly this is now.
They are, as you indicate, businesses: Their mission is to create income, it has not been to inform the pub
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But unfortunately this does not work, because of the way interest works, and the way monopolies work in a free market. If one of them gets a major bulk of the outstanding loans in an economy, they can still manage to sustain themselves at a very low interest rate that drives the other competitor banks out of
Altavista (Score:3, Informative)
I say that Google profits from connecting users to content. It is a service that most web publishers appreciate greatly. Google, unlike any other search engine ever, goes to great pains to deliver the least-skewed results possible. Google is constantly on the hunt for people who game their system. That's why they succeed.
The quote's a good contrast with Altavista, which started out with "least-skewed" results, but declined when they were attacked by search engine gamers flooding the results with crap that they never really got very good at filtering out. All the while adding various portal features that cluttered up the site and tried to push users towards content they weren't looking for.
press hate google because it drives UP quality (Score:3, Interesting)
Traditionally, the press have cultivated "loyalty" among their readership - not factual reporting. That means they want people who are comfortable with their output and will believe (or at least agree with) their content and read what is put in front of them without any critical thought. The way people find news with google is that they go and search for a topic or story or word - not for a publications's title (which they already have bookmarked). That puts pressure on the content providers to publish true, concise, and short pieces that googlers will compare with the other search results from other news sources,. before settling on reading the whole story (and advertisements) from one newspaper or news outlet.
The quote answers the article's own question. (Score:2)
goes to great pains to deliver the least-skewed results possible
That is the problem they have right there, or at least one of the problems some of the publishers have with Google. The don't want any unhelpful unskewed sources out there. They either want things skewed in their direction or skewed so badly another way that they can gain public support "capital" (or just some common or garden PR fodder) by making an issue of it.
Re:Excuse me? (Score:5, Insightful)
There, corrected that for ya.
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Nobody likes middlemen, especially middlemen who cut into their bottom line.
I like middlemen like Google that connects sites to searchers. The searchers like it. Who is this Nobody that doesn't like it, besides Murdoch of the News Corporation?
Google provides a link to the sites in the search results. Yes, they have ads, but how does that cut into the bottom line of a news site that people can find have an article with info the're looking for? When the searcher hit
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Corrected? Doesn't "middlemen who control a large part of the business" and "middlemen who cut into their bottom line" amount to the same? If the distributor can easily switch to a different supplier (e.g. Walmart) the distributor gets a fat share, if the supplier can easily switch to a different distributor (e.g. Apple) the supplier gets a fat share. Unless you have a stupid middle man, but don't count on that to last...
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It's pretty funny that suddenly businesses want to bring down Google because fewer people are buying their buggy whips.
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That is one of the dillemas of the Internet. So perhaps localized vendors need to come to grips with the problem of advertising on global media. This was not much of a problem when newspapers were essentially local, exceptions being the WSJ etc.
But to hear mass media such as Fox News complain about this would be truly unfortunate. And to hear their web advertisers complain would be ludicrous.
Of course, local newspapers that could attract global (or even far-flung) advertisers based on their attraction to
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That is one of the dillemas of the Internet. So perhaps localized vendors need to come to grips with the problem of advertising on global media. This was not much of a problem when newspapers were essentially local, exceptions being the WSJ etc.
Boo-fucking-woo. When I watch The Daily Show on comedy central's website i get ads for a dutch isp. So apparently someone figured out how to work it.
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"Imagine where Microsoft might still be if all the solid evidence against them had stayed behind a firewall too."
i decline your offer to imagine M$ hiding behind firewalls, i've seen the world that way. as for google there is evidence of them not playing fair, forcing small open source software to accept young coders, under the umbrella of the 'summer of code' they also have the google desktop tool, free searching your pc supposedly as a 'value' add on.
the evidence against google is not all behind a firewal
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How does this hurt the consumer?