Recently I’ve seen two stories about French and Brazilian news services demanding money from Google for the right to index their news stories, and I’ve heard grumblings of similar things from other sources.
From what I can glean, all Google news does is copy headlines and maybe the first couple of sentences of a news articles, and provides a link to the original article. Google claims that all this does is drive traffic to the original site and ought to be a net gain for everyone. The news orgs claim that the practice hurts them.
Frankly, my opinion on this is totally one-sided for Google. I can’t really see how Google’s indexing of news sites does anything but drive traffic to those news sites. The only way it wouldn’t is if the headline and first few sentences of an article are all a user would want to read, so they don’t bother following the link even if they were interested in reading the story.
But, I also find it hard to believe that all these news orgs are making a fuss over nothing. Is there another side to this that is damaging to the news orgs that I’m just not understanding?
Newspapers aren’t the most tech-savvy industry. It’s quite possible that Google’s view is right, and it’s provably right, but they still opposite what Google’s doing on the belief that it’s wrong.
More likely the complaint is that Google News picks a single “best” source for each article, and the papers are afraid that if there are 9 breaking news articles in a particular day, instead of coming to their homepage and getting 9 article views, they’ll get maybe 1-2 article views from Google News, as it redirects people to other papers for the other stories.
This assumes that if Google News didn’t exist, people would stop using news aggregation, which seems unlikely. More likely what would happen is people would move to other aggregators.
Just guessing (and probably wrong). Wouldn’t the original news sites be losing ad revenue because of Google’s indexing? If I am interested in (say) Brazilian news and Google is indexing all that I only need to pop over to the original news site for the specific articles that I want to look at and as a result will only see ads at the original news site when I go to one of those specific articles rather than every time I decide to browse the Brazilian news. So, the payment would be for the lost ad revenue.
There’s also the issue that google is profiting from the news organisations’s IP and not contributing anything back to the news organisation and may even be diverting people away from the news organisations’s front pages by aggregating news.
I often get enough from google that I don’t need to visit the site. For example - there’s recently been trouble with some dog treats. I google it, google shows me:
“More chicken jerky dog treats have been recalled…”
I didn’t buy chicken jerky treats, so I’m done. How many other people are doing this? Is it enough to hurt revenue? I can understand why web sites would be concerned.