Portuguese media companies, struggling through the worst recession since the 1970s, are pressing Google to pay for content on its news search engine, echoing similar demands elsewhere in Europe.
I’m not sure I understand the demands by these media companies. Google links to the articles which should bring in traffic to the sites, enabling them to make money. I don’t see any ads on Google News, so it doesn’t appear they are making money from it.
They didnt make any money from google reader either. It did kill the RSS reader industry though.
“should bring traffic to the sites” just like huffington post should, doesnt always work out in practice.
Huff post is different. They re-write the stories and hope you’ll stay on their site. Google News links directly to the original site.
Its not a perfect analogy, but close
I have a feeling lots of people only skim news sites, reading only headlines and the leads which that google news provides.
How much traffic does google news provide for loopinsight?
We’re not on Google News, but some of the other sites I’ve talked to said it’s significant when they are linked.
This is one of those situations where I’m entirely on Google’s side. All Google News does is drive traffic to other sites, unless people are just skimming for headlines, which isn’t exactly going to drive ad view revenue anyway. Google should just blacklist them for a few months.
I’m sure Google News will get shutdown soon anyway, it’s basically been replaced by twitter.
A lot of articles, and e.g. so-called “natural language analyzers” like Summly live on this simple fact, have a de facto summary in the first paragraph.
I can’t speak for other regions, but here in Europe Google News pretty much delivers what 90+% of users want from an article. And for most people there is absolutely no need to click on a link and go to the source (I have 11k users in my company and web logs to prove that.)
If Google is making money here or not is not the point. They factually provide a free service (which is not free, the cost of the service is covered by ad-based profits from an online ad monopoly) that kills other companies’ profits.
Let me make a silly example. I have a monopoly in, say, government approved garbage bags. I make billions from that. Now, I want to destroy the papers. I hire a few thousand people who go to every pub, every office, every shop and have them summarize the news (not Proust in this case) for free. Would people still buy a paper?
Google is destroying other businesses. Period. If they have an agenda, or just do it for fun? I don’t know. But that does not make it better.
With RSS (to stay with the example), content creators are in control of how much content they want to give away. WIth Google News they are not. That’s the difference.