Google News To Shut Down In Spain On December 16th 183
An anonymous reader writes The news aggregation services offered by Google is set to be no longer available for Spain, starting December 16th, 2014. The decision of Google comes as response to new Spanish legislation that gives publishers the right to claim compensation for republishing any part of their content. This follows news of services of startup Uber being forbidden in countries like Spain as well as Germany and some city councils worldwide like Delhi, or other services like AirBnb being put under pressure to cope with local laws in other jurisdictions.
They will either change their mind (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They will either change their mind (Score:5, Interesting)
They won't change their minds - not until it's too late (which, for many of them, it already is). It's already been tried elsewhere, with negative results:
FTFA
in November, Germany's largest publisher, Axel Springer scrapped a bid to block Google after an experiment by a consortium of about 200 German publishers caused online traffic to plunge. Internet search experts say the shutdown of Google News in Spain may be greater on smaller, less-well known news publishers than on name-brand news sites who are less reliant on the site to draw in readers
Re:They will either change their mind (Score:5, Insightful)
> the shutdown of Google News in Spain may be greater on smaller, less-well known news publishers than on name-brand news sites
Which seems to be the goal of most new legislation: protect the big established players, kill the small upcoming competition.
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Also, I would like to know why this only applies to Google news. I'm pretty sure Google puts excerpts from the article in regular search results as well. Why are those excerpts not counted in this legislation while the ones on Google News are?
Re:They will either change their mind (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming the summary is correct (I know, I know), the legislation doesn't require payment by Google, it only allows the original publisher to collect payment from Google. If the small publishers want to have links to their sites show up in Google News without Google paying them, all they would have to do is send a letter to Google granting them permission. It would be up to each publisher to decide which way they want to go.
From what I've read [searchengineland.com] the Spanish law specifically does not allow publishers to opt out.
"If you are a digital editor that publishes with a copyleft license, like myself, and you minimally understand how the internet actually works, you cannot decide to not charge Google News. It is compulsory. More than a right it is an obligation. Therefore, Google cannot exclude sites requiring payment from Google News. It would still need to pay for those it includes, even if they do not want to be compensated."
Re:They will either change their mind (Score:5, Informative)
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It's not fucked up. If it was not made compulsory, some sites (aka traitors) would offer their news articles to google news for free. Then google would only show news articles they got for free and refuse to show articles from news sites that demand a payment. Pretty soon, the payment news site would die out from lack of visibility on the web. So the law is designed to prevent that -- prevent people from offering free stuff that would destroy the market.
If google won't pay, some other news aggregator will a
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"If google won't pay, some other news aggregator will arise and will offer the same service but with payment to news sites."
With what money?
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Good question, and I don't know the answer. The money could come from ads or a subscription or a hybrid of those two.
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Surely the lawmakers must have seen that one coming.
You have more faith in Politicians than I do.
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Why bother making the fee compulsory if you're going to allow people to just turn around and charge a fee of $0?
There's a simple answer to that: charge any publisher who wants to be relisted the mandatory compensation amount, plus 10%. Let the publishers pay their own subsidy.
I wonder (Score:2)
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No, all they have to do is turn it up to '11'.
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Google's not willing to compromise, because the moment they're sending the news companies a $2 check/year, they've established that they'll pay.
As the saying goes, the next step is to negotiate the prices. Google doesn't want that precedent, especially since it could/would spread to other countries. The German companies, for example, spent millions getting a similar ruling, only to fold and allow Google to do it's thing for free when they found out that their own page hits dropped like a rock when Google
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One would wonder how that would extend to things that a copyright holder is actively choosing to freely share or distribute,. such as BSD or GPL works.
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Because that's how governments work these days ... whoever has the deepest pockets to pay the government to pass laws which favor them wins.
Welcome to the oligarchy. America is as mired in this crap as anyone else, if not more.
The world is now largely defined in terms of corporate interests, and governments will do anything they're asked for the most part.
And since the copyright cartels have been leading this charge, don't be surprised that they're further fucking things up for their own short-term interes
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Google has very big pockets. They just don't want to pay for content.
Particularly for a service which doesn't generate any revenue.
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> the shutdown of Google News in Spain may be greater on smaller, less-well known news publishers than on name-brand news sites
Which seems to be the goal of most new legislation: protect the big established players, kill the small upcoming competition.
On what planet do you live? Obviously not the earth because Google is small relative to no other existing companies in the world.
To be honest we simply have not yet found the "right" answer to the problems posed the by the new internet technologies, whether that be in regards to news content, publishing, music or video distribution. The fact remains Google does not do news, they do not employee reporters, they do no investigative reporting, they do absolutely nothing that adds any value to the actual work d
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Internet search experts say the shutdown of Google News in Spain may be greater on smaller, less-well known news publishers than on name-brand news sites who are less reliant on the site to draw in readers
Obviously they have calculated that he loss of traffic from Google News will result in less revenue loss than the reduction in traffic due to smaller sites getting more of "their" traffic.
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Internet search experts say the shutdown of Google News in Spain may be greater on smaller, less-well known news publishers than on name-brand news sites who are less reliant on the site to draw in readers
Obviously they have calculated that he loss of traffic from Google News will result in less revenue loss than the reduction in traffic due to smaller sites getting more of "their" traffic.
That could very well be part of their calculation - squeeze the little players out. Fortunately, the reality is that smaller players are usually less ossified, more flexible, lower fixed overhead, and more likely to take chances the bigger players wouldn't even consider. And people always sympathize with the underdog :-)
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People might sympathize with and support the underdog, but if Google News is taken out of the picture, people might not ever see these small sites at all. You can't support something if you don't know it is out there.
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las últimas declaraciones de Wert contradicen ese carácter de irrenunciabilidad, sin embargo los agregadores no pueden negociar con el medio directamente (lo haría AEDE) y sólo sirve para la cuantía, no para la exención.
Spanish source in Spanish: http://es.gizmodo.com/internet... [gizmodo.com] http://es.gizmodo.com/que-sign... [gizmodo.com]
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Or they'll double-down and use the subsequent tanking of their sites as "proof" for the EU Gov that Google is an "unfair monopoly".
How could this play out?
Step one : We poor, highly-taxed Europeans will be asked to dip once again into our empty pockets, this time to fund a bunch of over over-paid bureaucrats while they "investigate" Google,
Step two: They'll recommend that we subsidise a state-sponsored European alternative to Google, which will fail.
Don't laugh - they're mad enough to try it.
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They'll recommend that we subsidise a state-sponsored European alternative to Google, which will fail.
Don't laugh - they're mad enough to try it.
Such as Quaero [wikipedia.org], for instance ?
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They won't change their minds - not until it's too late (which, for many of them, it already is). It's already been tried elsewhere, with negative results:
I think google should move to comply with this IMMEDIATELY, as in they should have stopped aggregating these publishers within minutes of the law becoming effective. And then when publishers do relent, I think they should take a few weeks, at least, to start making that content available. Just my opinion ;-)
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They won't change their minds - not until it's too late (which, for many of them, it already is). It's already been tried elsewhere, with negative results:
I think google should move to comply with this IMMEDIATELY, as in they should have stopped aggregating these publishers within minutes of the law becoming effective. And then when publishers do relent, I think they should take a few weeks, at least, to start making that content available. Just my opinion ;-)
Publishers cannot relent. The law doesn't allow them to require payment for snippets (like the German law did), it requires them to require payment. Which is why Google is shutting Google News down entirely in Spain... since all Spanish publisher are required to get paid, and Google isn't going to pay them, there will be no Spanish content for the Spanish Google News, making it useless.
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Publishers cannot relent.
Of course they can. They can go back to the same politicians they bamboozled the first time, and say "oops!" and get the law repealed.
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Publishers cannot relent.
Of course they can. They can go back to the same politicians they bamboozled the first time, and say "oops!" and get the law repealed.
True. I suspect it won't happen, though, because the most influential publishers are also the ones who will be least harmed. And, if you believe other commenters with more knowledge of Spanish politics, the ones who will be propped up by government funding should they be hurt too much.
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It doesn't matter what the publishers say, Google will have to comply until the law is changed. I'd be rather surprised if that happens quickly.
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or go out of business as soon as they notice that more and more people are no longer finding their news site.
This is a classic case of someone assuming something has value, that can be extracted from a user, simply because it is available or used. Google probably aggregates a lot more news then ever gets read; to assume that is a signal that their is value in the content being used. In reality, it is used because it is free, much like the free papers you see in many cities. People will read them if they are free but if they have to pay then they pass. As a result, papers give out free editions to reach an audienc
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The real question is will they go back and demand that lawmakers "fix" this by forcing Google to aggregate and pay or realize their basic assumption is wrong and abolish the law? I'd bet on some variant of the former.
Consider what google is doing in Spain. It'd be like demanding a general store carry bicycles after it decided to get out of the bicycle business because it was unprofitable.
Google is getting out of the news aggregation business in the country completely. Well, unless they fold like Germany did.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Conversely, American companies need to grow into the rest of the world to keep their shareholders happy and keep revenues moving upwards.
America has largely put it's eggs into the basket of global technology corporations who keep expanding their markets indefinitely, and buoy the stock market,
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That is because you cannot get wildly rich in the stock market unless there is lots of volatility in it. The only way to make lots of money is when a company either gains or loses value faster than what is expected. Notice this is the perceived market value not the actual value a company has.
Re:Things happen outside US!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not anti-American to recognize that countries that are not the US have laws that differ from American laws. The US has just as much history of legally protected rackets (software patents, spying on behalf of American corporations, banning Tesla from selling cars, telco monopolies, in fact, I think the US has a far worse record than Germany on this).
So why is it to anti-American to expect companies to obey the laws of the country they operate in? Maybe because American companies are used to buying laws? Guess what: that's what just happened in Spain. That mess is as American as you can get.
Yes, that Spanish law is stupid, but the summary is stupid for trying to connect it to Uber and Airbnb. Uber, by the way, are a bunch of thugs who even many Americans agree should go out of business as soon as possible.
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Well, this rule seems smart "It is illegal to rent out DVDs/BRs not specially licensed to that purpose"
Makes perfect business sense that I own a dvd store, I rent that copy out 100 time, why not pay the artist 100 time ( like a movie theater )
It's leveraging the investment. Sound solid, and I happen not to like that idea, but again, it makes perfect business sense.
Censorship (Score:5, Interesting)
I am from Spain. The most interesting thing about this is that this stupid law was rushed throught the parlamentary process by surprise, with an ammendment added at the last minute. On the same period, three of the most important reporters that were critical to the government in the big spanish media were fired.
There is especulation that the two things are linked and this was a deal between the Spanish government and the owners of the big media conglomerates in Spain. The media got this law against Google in exchange for supporting the ailing government party which is 50% down in the polls as compared to the last general election, and panicking.
So the big media owners got what they wanted in exchange of censoring news critical to the government. What they do not realize is that this is going to hit their bottom lines because Google is not going to fold down. The are going to lose lots of money and media, and other newspapers from outside Spain are going to increase their share. At the end they will run to the government asking them to remove this law. Or they may even do it before the law is in place, when they see that Google is going to shut them down. The will deserve the humilliation. And this will tarnish their credibility because of the deal they did with the government. They are fools.
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The problem I see here is a symptom of Europe run by people who are from another era, at least in terms of thinking. The reaction by the papers is a natural one, but it is more of a knee jerk reaction that trying to understand the technology and how it works. What we need are younger people getting into politics, at least in terms of technology advisors, such that decisions aren't being made based on a reality that is 40 years past.
For the journalists, often the best way to be able to write open their own c
Re:Censorship (Score:5, Interesting)
You are right,
And in a way, this can be seen as a reaction to the raise of a political party in Spain: Podemos. It translates into "we can" and it is made up of young people that are trying to rethink the whole democracy thing, turning it into a more direct democracy. It has gone from not existing to being the first in the polls in a period of two years. It has the old traditional parties panicking.
This seems to be the answer from the old elite. Censorship and personal attacks. And it is backfiring. With each of this actions, they show how corrupted and misguided they are, and podemos raises in the polls. People do not trust the traditional media (TV and papers) anymore and seeks information directly from other sources on the web.
I don't think podemos will end up governing the country. They are far left, at least they were at the beginning, although they are moderating their statements as they become wider. But this is causing lots of changes for good on Spanish politics, with the traditional parties not being able to turn their head anymore on corruption, corporate tax evasion or undehanded lobying.
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The people who "run Europe" may be from a different era, but it is a bit too much to simply assume that they are stupid.
The problem they are trying to address with laws like this is the destruction of the press by the internet. I know, technology and bu
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Na, it's just standard MBA thinking. If Google can make a news web site and get all that traffic, then surely if the news sites can get it shut down there will be a gap in the market and people will just go directly to their sites, right? The content is the valuable bit, not the aggregation... Or, well, if people like aggregation, let's aggregate all the different brands our company owns, that's the same thing.
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Europe. Right. Because this is what happens in each and every European country. For example the ones that see broadband as a basic human right. They're thinking in another era too.
Of course, that era is ahead of the US, but the point still holds, right?
Censorship (Score:2)
At the end they [the newspapers] will run to the government asking them to remove this law.
And the critical reporters will still be fired.
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Go ahead, try to sweep away the flood (Score:4, Interesting)
Spain and certain other countries are wallowing relics of another age, unable to adapt to the new reality. The loss is theirs. How do they expect to keep their populations from discovering the power of VPNs, Tor, and the other facilities which can effortlessly sidestep their moronic restrictions?
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Spain and certain other countries are wallowing relics of another age, unable to adapt to the new reality. The loss is theirs. How do they expect to keep their populations from discovering the power of VPNs, Tor, and the other facilities which can effortlessly sidestep their moronic restrictions?
You're missing the point.
Google isn't going to stop showing "news" in spain. They are going to stop showing "Spanish Newspapers" in spain. Spanish citizens wont stop reading the news, they'll just get it from sources outside of the country. The media industries victory is going to turn to ashes in their mouth pretty quickly.
They forget where most of their money comes from (Score:2)
Re:They forget where most of their money comes fro (Score:5, Insightful)
Newspaper advertising traditionally gained its value from the newspaper's demographic. You know the readership, so you know who you're advertising to. Certain newspapers will carry adverts for cheap lager, others expensive champagne. But this notion of a "readership" has been destroyed by Google News -- people now don't chose "their" newspaper, and the advertising becomes untargeted. Newspaper websites are now looking at the same sort of advertising revenues as people's personal blogs. Everything is outsourced to the Google algorithm, and the newspaper itself adds no value to the advertiser.
It is possible that ending the Google News aggregation will mean that sites regain a "readership" and therefore can return to negotiating their own advertising, and that this will result in them returning to profit.
Spain is different... (Score:3)
...and a little bit retarded.
If only this were about making a stand against Google, but it's not. As with what happend last year in France, It's mostly about moribund institutions looking for a handout. What's also astonishing is the bit about republishing "any part of their content." Yes, I think this will end well.
This is just another example of the special relationship that exists in Spain between corporate interests and the government; almost always against the best interests of the consumer. So you get things like a maximum of 5% discount on books, no Uber, an arbitrary tax on recordable media and recording devices that goes to a slush fund fronting as a recording artists association. All with the blessing and sanction of the government. !Arriba Espana!
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...and a little bit retarded.
If only this were about making a stand against Google, but it's not.
You guys are missing the whole point of this law. It's not about the news corporation making money, really. At all. This is what the law is about:
- Whenever any news article is linked from anything (except "social networks") that "anything" has to pay to the media association. It doesn't matter if you link to a newspaper that doesn't want to be paid. It doesn't work that pay. If there's a link, payment to that association is mandatory.
So the expected result is that there's going to be less links, which
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Unlike German law (Score:5, Informative)
where individual newspaper publisher can wave their fee and beg Google to reindex their paper, the Spanish version of the law is universal. The only way for the newspaper to get their content re-indexed is for the law to either be tossed out or they repeal it. Oh the pain will last longer here.
In other News (Score:2)
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Defaults (Score:2)
Won't google just change the default news site (on chrome, chromebooks and android devices) to news.google.com and have a link there for espanol...
Correcting the crappy summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Some big errors in the summary:
The decision of Google comes as response to new Spanish legislation that gives publishers the right to claim compensation for republishing any part of their content.
No, if this was the case, it'd just be a rehash of the German situation. No, the problem here is that it gives publishers the obligation to claim compensation. This law is specifically designed to prevent the German situation. So other newspapers can't decide they'd rather have Google's traffic anyway, and thereby undermine this boycott of Google News.
It also fixes another problem that big Spanish newspapers had: on Google News, you could just as easily find small, independent news sites that were critical of the current (conservative) government, as the sites of the major newspapers (which are mostly supportive of the government). Outside Google News, the small press is a lot harder to find. This law removes competition for the big guys as well as criticism about the government. Win-win for big corps and the government. Lose for the people and the small independent press.
Also:
This follows news of services of startup Uber being forbidden in countries like Spain as well as Germany and some city councils worldwide like Delhi, or other services like AirBnb being put under pressure to cope with local laws in other jurisdictions.
This issue has nothing to do with Uber and Airbnb not complying with local laws. There is nothing wrong with foreign companies having to obey local laws in they want to operate there. This, however, is a new law that will hurt the small Spanish press (Google won't be hurt that much, since they don't make money on Google News anyway).
By the way complaints against Uber and Airbnb (which should have been irrelevant to this story but now aren't because of the stupid summary) are not that unreasonable; they're side-stepping consumer-protection regulations that exist for good reasons. In some places they're also side-stepping monopolies or cartels, which is great of course, but some of the laws they're running afoul of are actually good laws.
As a final word, Uber are by now well known to be a bunch of thugs who need to go out of business as soon as possible.
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Don't worry about the big media companies. They'll get some government grants to help them stay in business (in exchange for lauding how wonderful the current government is). Smaller publications who are more critical of the government won't get these grants and will go out of business. To quote mcvos: "Win-win for big corps and the government. Lose for the people and the small independent press."
Important Spanish news? (Score:2)
Is Franco still dead?
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Is Slashdot paying Reuters and the BBC for the stories summarized and linked to here? Do you think they should be?
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There's a potential difference. The problem is that Google News has become a one-stop-shop for many people (myself included). This means that we don't stay on the newspaper site, going back to Google News to look for the next interesting story. This means that advertising revenues on the content sites are minimal, and pretty much every news site on the entire internet is a loss-making enterprise. This is unsustainable.
Google's solution to claims of profiting off others' work was to run Google News without a
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Most of the people going to any particular new site aren't local (maybe not even the same country), so how are they "losing"? If they use a news aggregator that serves up geo-related or user-related ads (such as google), they at least have the ability to make some coin, rather than showing ads that are totally irrelevant to someone in another country.
Newspapers aren't in the news business - they're in the advertising business. That's always been the case, with the exception of the old pamphleteers [wikipedia.org], which
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Yes, but the value of each page impression in advertising in print media comes from knowing the demographic that you're selling to. The only really successful virtual newspaper I know of is The Register [theregister.co.uk], and they can handle their own advertising content precisely because they have a specific demographic. Their readership consists mainly of tech professionals with geeky hobbies, and there are multiple big sponsors looking to get the attention of that audience -- whether it's IT vendors like Citrix or Cisco,
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One of the problems is that most newspapers, in order to attract a more varied readership, added things like "Lifestye" and other "soft news/no news" content. That worked in the 80s and 90s but it doesn't work any more because people can get the no-news stuff from anywhere, so in the end, by diluting their main content, they've lost their core audience - people who want news, editorials, and related stuff.
It's like slashdot adding Bennett whats-his-name's ruminations. Dilutes the product, alienates^Wp*sses
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I typically dont go past the slashdot article, I am willing to bet that it is relativity the same amount of people on both that stop or click though.
so if it is not googles fault it is still googles responsibility to fix it, not the sites themselves, according to your theory?
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Google's solution to claims of profiting off others' work was to run Google News without any advertising content, but that doesn't deal with the fact that Google News is a contributory factor to the financial woes of the content providers it relies on. If Google wants Google News to survive, it must exist in a viable ecosystem, and right now it doesn't. Even if you don't think this is Google's fault, the problem still exists and must be dealt with.
In the good old days, newspapers really didn't make that much from subscriptions. Most of their revenue was from advertising. Google, by making a story from a given site that probably has ads, is helping.
The bigger problem news outlets have is that they no longer have captive audiences. In transitioning to electronic delivery, they've failed to maintain their value to local merchants in favor of taking advertising dollars from big companies. Personally, I could read an online newspaper that has ads
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In the good old days, newspapers really didn't make that much from subscriptions.
True fact.
Most of their revenue was from advertising.
True fact.
Google, by making a story from a given site that probably has ads, is helping.
Untrue conjecture.
The bigger problem news outlets have is that they no longer have captive audiences.
Replace the word "captive" with "specific", and you have the truth.
The problem isn't just about location, but about wider demographics. By virtue of having a particular voluntary readership (whether that readership is "locals", or "geeks", or "conservatives", or "working-class people"), the newspaper had a premium product for the advertisers -- it was a form of targeted advertising in and of itself. It also associated the product with the newspaper brand, for extra posi
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Is Slashdot paying Reuters and the BBC for the stories summarized and linked to here? Do you think they should be?
There's a potential difference. The problem is that Google News has become a one-stop-shop for many people (myself included). This means that we don't stay on the newspaper site, going back to Google News to look for the next interesting story.
Isn't Slashdot exactly the same?
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Something may well need to be done, but the ball is in the newspaper's court. If they produce news articles that are interesting for more than one paragraph, they will get ad impressions. If they're just re-stating what another news agency already said, what good are they and why do they expect money for that?
What happened to newspapers that actually dug for real news, even exclusives? Back in the day when they prided themselves over how many times their reporters were thrown out, beaten up, or otherwise ob
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Re:Google needs to share (Score:4, Insightful)
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Because site advertising wasn't covering their running costs. The newspapers need a business model that delivers profits
That's a different issue. The publishers are trying to become profitable by selling their content rather than through advertising. They could have used Google to send them visitors who are willing to pay, but instead they tried to sell directly to Google. Google declined to make the purchase. Sounds like a poor decision by the publishers.
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For what you are saying to be correct they could have used robots.txt. They did not do that. The other facet that contradicts your comment is that the payment was mandatory. A news publication, blog or anyone cannot choose not to mandate the payment. So forward thinking next generation news sites cannot decide their own model. If these sites are so concerned about remaining profitable by the money Google was preventing them from gathering they could put up a pay wall as well. Oh wait no one is going to p
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There is at least one other instance I am aware of that might suggest you are correct:
https://www.techdirt.com/artic... [techdirt.com]
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But Google doesn't make any money on their Spanish news site; they were driving traffic to the sites of the companies that are now banning Google News from Spain.
Re:Google needs to share (Score:4, Informative)
no ads on google news as far as i can remember...
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Re:Google needs to share (Score:4, Insightful)
They should build better websites. The reason I don't stay on most news websites is not google news, it's paywalls, obtrusive ads, autoplaying videos, etc.
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Don't forget the big one: The quality of news articles mostly sucks. Most news publishers are failures at providing good news stories. Aggregators separate the wheat from a larger pool of chaff.
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Loss of revenue 20 years ago cannot be blamed on the net. In 1994, it was mostly college students on the net.
But by that point, quality was already shot with a lot of papers reduced to wire service articles and who-shot-who.
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I tend to agree. The free information age has put a number of obstacles in the way of news providers. It took most news providers many years to opt into the free information age but possibly too late. When they finally got onboard, most news providers had sites built but the content and quality of presentation was poor to say the least. Limited articles (for non subscribers) and crappy layouts. Many of them are better now but with google and yahoo news, who needs them now?
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A lot of the "news" are actually newsvertisements or taken out verbatim from another news agency like Reuters anyway.
Re:Robots.txt (Score:4, Insightful)
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If it really is that way, then can't Google News still operate in Spain but just only show content from publishers it knows to be
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And the other crime is google replicating news headlines and summary on its site reduces the news site's income and visibility, because while the news site creates the news story, people don't visit the site unless they are really interested in the article. Only google profits from this at the expense of the news site.
In short, since hardly anyone reads TFA (just like slashdot readers), they simply skim the headline and summary, no one will visit the news site. They will instead get their news from google n