Google, News Corp and a bit of advice for restaurants
December 4th, 2009 by Lloyd Gofton
The Google - News Corp debate has been raging this week, and while at first I made the decision not to add to the many, many, many opinions on this issue, after a debate with a colleague earlier today, I realised I couldn’t resist. So Tim, I blame you.
Some of the comments made this week by both Murdoch and Google have been quite telling in my opinion, and it’s much more than just the two big boys of media jousting for position. The Guardian has provided excellent commentary all week.
To recap, Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation addressed the US media regulators’ workshop in Washington this week, where he made a speech punctuated by his comment that internet users will pay for content, saying they would be happy to shell out for “information they need to rise in society”, before going on to attack internet news aggregation as “theft”, claiming that advertising-only business models were dead.
“From the beginning on, newspapers have prospered for one reason: giving readers the news that they want…If we fail, we fail like a restaurant that makes meals that no one wants to eat.”
Murdoch offered some points that made absolute sense, i.e. the restaurant example, and a few that didn’t, such as the ‘theft’, and ‘rise in society’ points above.
I think that simply suggesting Murdoch is blaming Google for the demise of national media is a bit of an over-simplification, although I don’t think he would be too upset if that was the general assumption. However, I think he has missed one key point, which is that Newspapers are so late to the content revolution that it’s nearly destroyed them, and that now they are realising the scale of the issue, their only response is to place traditional media monetisation rules on a medium which not only doesn’t accept these rules, but has also been enjoying their content free for years.
Why would you pay for a service that hasn’t changed or evolved at all from the service that you’ve been getting for free for years? Is news from newspaper sources more valuable to the user than news from other sources? Are people that loyal to a newspaper brand to pay for online content that has no added value and is no more useful than news form other sources? Not in my opinion.
So what about Google’s response to this? Well, both Matt Brittin, the director of Google UK, and Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive have made interesting comments in return. Schmidt’s was in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, which many will point to as a success in terms of paid-for content.
But I was especially interested in Brittin’s comments, who was speaking in UK Parliament to the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, as he worked as director of strategy and digital at Daily Mirror publisher Trinity Mirror before joining Google in 2007, so he should understand the issue.
My favourite quotes from Brittin were:
“We do not steal content. If you look at Google search and Google News what you will find is snippets, a little line that will take you through to the original websites…
“That’s accepted as in line with copyright law worldwide, seen as like a newspaper article quoting lines from a book in a book review. We defend copyright owners’ rights and it’s wrong to paint us as stealing content. We are like a virtual newsagent…
“Publishers have control, they choose to make content available for free online. They have control now and have always had control to allow them to opt out. They can say, ‘I don’t want to appear in Google search or in Google News or in one and not the other.
“They choose to stay and have content discoverable because they find it helpful to have huge numbers of people coming through to their content.”
That pretty much says it all in my opinion. Google and other search engines are driving many thousands of readers to these websites, if the publishers wish to opt out they can do, and this is something Murdoch has threatened and I believe would do if pushed.
However, as we all now know, this week Google has also made a concession by allowing publishers of paid for content to limit the amount of free access users have to their websites from Google News.
This means publishers can limit Google News users to no more than five pages of content a day without registering or subscribing. In affect, Google is still driving traffic to the content, but the publishers get their fee if the user wishes to continue looking or get more content.
I think this is Google’s way of settling the publishers down. Google has the upper hand in the long term, and whether this decision was affected by political forces I guess we’ll never know, but by giving a little Google gets a lot in the long term, and I feel the outcome will still be the same.
In reality most users will look at other sources for their news once the free clicks have gone from major publishers, or learn that it becomes a nuisance navigating away from publisher’s sites after the free clicks, so stop visiting them in the first place. That is unless, you’ve guessed it, there is more useful and relevant content on offer to warrant a charge.
In many ways this is similar to a restaurant that makes meals that no one wants to eat, as Murdoch said, or more precisely a restaurant that charges today for exactly the same meal that it offered free yesterday.
Tags: Content, google, news corp, pay wall, Publishers, Rupert Murdoch
