Yet the unlimited expanse that the Internet provides and the amazing capacity of Google (and Yahoo and MSN, etc.) to search it, soon began to change everything. Vending services like eBay and Craigslist flourished; sensations like MySpace and YouTube, where users provide the content, were born at the intersection of creativity and engineering; audiences were suddenly huge for essentially brand-new Web news providers online, such as MSNBC and CNN. Sites like The Drudge Report showed the potential of aggregation and, later, The Huffington Post showed the potential for garnering large crowds partly by recycling material created elsewhere.
Significantly, most of the established news organizations reached the same conclusion about how to take advantage of what was happening on the Web. They went for the model that had supported network television for decades—mass audiences attracted by free access that would justify high advertising rates. Virtually overnight, Google et al were delivering hundreds of millions of readers to media companies which, in turn, believed they could monetize those visitors.
This approach contrasted with the one adopted in the 1980s by the emerging cable systems for television. Those companies negotiated subscription fees with the providers of their most popular programming, such as ESPN and dozens of other channels, including some that carried news. (The average cable subscriber, for example, pays 77 cents per month for Fox News, whether they watch it or not.) Most cable networks also have copious advertising, from inexpensive pitches for local establishments to national campaigns. This flow of subscription revenues, combined with advertising, made cable programming a lucrative business—which, ironically, resembles the way newspapers and magazines operated until they unilaterally decided they were better off giving content away. (There are differences, of course, especially since barriers to a cable system are high, while barriers to launching on the Web are low, even though moguls like Barry Diller at The Daily Beast and others have found themselves investing real money there to get started.)
As the scale of the global economic implosion became clear, accelerating negative trends in circulation and advertising already under way, it became increasingly obvious that the free-content model was not working. News audiences were huge. On September 29, 2008, the day the Bush administration’s first bailout proposal was voted down by the House of Representatives and the Dow fell almost eight hundred points, NYTimes.com had 10 million visitors and 42.7 million page views. But revenues for The New York Times Company were disappearing so fast that this respected gatherer of news had to beg and borrow just to meet its debt obligations and maintain its news operation while also sustaining morale for the myriad innovations necessary to stay extant. This spring it threatened to shut down The Boston Globe, another financially sick newspaper with healthy traffic on its Web site. Unless new ways of attracting and sharing revenue are devised with the same breathtaking speed with which they have disappeared, the gathering of news by reputable, experienced institutions that are cornerstones of their community and the nation will be irreversibly damaged.
Print journalism bought into the free-news online model. Still, it is hardly surprising that the winners in the transformation of news dissemination, the distributors and aggregators, would become the focus of grievances by those they have trounced, willfully or not. So what is to be done to manage the consequences of this inexorable transformation of news delivery? If there is a simple, all-encompassing answer to that question, I did not find it in discussions with practitioners and pundits on all sides of the problem. But in the haze, I did find a tripartite framework for understanding the major aspects of the issue—let’s call them the doctrines of Fair Conduct, Fair Use, and Fair Compensation.
Fair Conduct
On Saturday afternoon, February 7, 2009, SI.com, the Web site of Sports Illustrated, broke a huge story: Alex Rodriguez, the mega-rich Yankees star, had taken performance-enhancing drugs while playing for the Texas Rangers. Sports Illustrated released the story on its Web site rather than in the magazine, according to the editors involved, in an effort to enhance SI.com’s standing as a destination for fans increasingly conditioned to getting sports news online. Within hours the story was everywhere, but if you went through Google to find it, what you likely got instead were the pickups that appeared elsewhere, summaries or even rewrites, with attribution. Most galling was that The Huffington Post’s use of an Associated Press version of SI’s report was initially tops on Google, which meant that it, and not SI.com, tended to be the place readers clicking through to get the gist of the breaking scandal would land.
Traffic on SI.com did go up on that Saturday and for days thereafter, but not nearly as much as the editors had projected. As long as the value of advertising on the Web is measured by the number of visitors a site receives, driving those numbers is critical, and therein lies the dilemma. Why did The Huffington Post come up ahead of SI.com? Because, even Google insiders concede, Huffington is effective at implementing search optimization techniques, which means that its manipulation of keywords, search terms, and the dynamics of Web protocol give it an advantage over others scrambling to be the place readers are sent by search engines. What angered the people at Sports Illustrated and Time Inc. is that Google, acting as traffic conductor, seemed unmoved by their grievance over what had happened to their ownership of the story. An SI editor quoted to me Time Inc’s editor-in-chief, John Huey, noting crisply that, “talking to Google is like trying to talk to a television.”
The rules of the road for distributing traffic on the Internet need to include recognition, in simple terms, of who got the story. The algorithm needs human help; otherwise, valuable traffic goes to sites that didn’t pay to create the content.
Fair Use
Everyone seems to be blaming Google (ie: SI when the tools are there for them to use just like HuffPost).
Isn't the real problem that there is no creative, new thinking in the executive suites of media? It seems they all look at saving current models or look envious at others like cable when in fact they should be looking at others like music and paying attention to how bands are now making money, not off music but other ancillary things. Maybe they should be reading Trent Resznor (NIN).
Posted by PXLated on Tue 14 Jul 2009 at 07:24 PM
This article seems to assume that there is inherent value to the reader in visiting a site that "breaks" some news. But the entire point of algorithms like Google's is that they don't assume things like this, they simply send readers where readers are likely to want to go (based on what people link to, how accessible site content is, and hundreds of other factors). And this makes sense: I don't care whether SI.com or The Huffington Post came up with the A-Rod story, for example, I only care about which place is more likely to have content I want to look at. If some news outlet consistently breaks compelling stories first, AND lets people know about that (see the story of Breaking News Online, and how it has more Twitter followers than many mainstream news sources), that's one of several ways of building an audience.
News organizations that want to survive need to stop trying to enforce their ideas of what is and isn't valuable by fiat, and instead try and make themselves valuable in ways readers care about: offer consistently compelling content, made accessible to everyone, and "market" your stories and site online using all the tools that the successful aggregators are using to get their pages in front of readers. If they offer an experience better than the aggregators, they will build an audience. If not, then why should I read them?
Posted by Peter Kasting on Tue 14 Jul 2009 at 08:28 PM
When you write "the referral mechanism makes a fortune and the creators get scraps," you misunderstand the relationship between Google's revenue and the news content it links to.
Google makes its money mostly from targeted advertising on product searches and other narrow, directed searches. The advertising on news-related searches is not nearly as valuable. Google could remove all newspapers and journalism content from its Web search catalog tomorrow and lose very little of its revenue. The links to news it provides are valuable to its users but not terribly valuable to its advertisers. (I just googled "Alex Rodriguez" and there wasn't a single ad on google's results page.)
The trouble for news publishers lies not with Google's search advertising but with the simple fact that the display advertising model that supported their profits on paper is not nearly as lucrative on the Web. Also, the Web itself is a giant aggregator, putting all these news publishers in direct competition with each other. Google is doing them a favor by sending them traffic. If it stopped it would be hurting them, not helping them.
Posted by Scott Rosenberg on Tue 14 Jul 2009 at 08:30 PM
It's interesting that cable television was held up as a good example of how to extract subscription fees for content. The American Custoemr Satisfaction Index from the University of Michigan said in 2007 that cable and satellite TV suffered "the lowest level of customer satisfaction among all industries covered". (As Jeff Jarvis points out in his recent book).
Are media organisations really suggesting that rock bottom customer satisfaction is okay as long as the money comes in? Again, a perfect example of serving the shareholders instead of the customers.
As to the example given of Sports Illustrated losing out to Huffington in Google, who's fault is that? Google ranks purely based on which site demonstrates it meets a custoemr query most effectively. If Huffington understand this and tailor their website accordingly, SI.com should be learning from the mistake and adjusting their site too. Shouting "We're special, we should be first" demonstrates the elitist and old-fashioned view held by legacy media. Blaming Google is like blaming the newsstand vendor for having Sports Illustrated on a lower shelf to another tabloid. Most publishers know that being racked in the most prominent position on the newsstand is vital to increased sales and adopt campaigns to engage vendors and sometimes even pay for this privilege. Why should Google be any different? They got a lower position because they didn't try hard enough to get a higher one within the free and open (and perfectly logical) mechanisms Google allows and that everyone else uses. End of story.
Google is about providing the customer what they want. The cable TV model is about extracting as much money from the customer even while pissing them off. Which attitude do you think is going to gain the most sympathy in the marketplace?
Posted by Kimota on Tue 14 Jul 2009 at 09:19 PM
If copyright were waived until such time as any derivative work made a profit as an American commentator argued a year or three ago, problem solved. As soon as any derivative work attracts an income stream then the holder of the original copyright will have a claim. No profit, no revenue. It woulld restore or encourage diversity and choice and make those sitting on copyright acting as a barrier to the free flow of information (UNESCO aim) seek its exploitation instead of acting as regressive agents in the information world.
Posted by Tim Baber on Wed 15 Jul 2009 at 04:14 AM
Wow...to not care where your information comes from, as a couple have said, sure seems dangerous. But, as long as you get that information, I guess it doesn't matter much if it's accurate, right? Gathering news (not blog or TV or radio ramblings) is expensive and requires actual time, work and thought. Distributing it is simple and cheap. Those two things clash. But it's far less troubling than an "As long as I gets mys info fer frees, I don'ts care wheres it comes from" mindset.
Posted by Scott on Wed 15 Jul 2009 at 09:25 AM
I noted that the author mentions how value is indirectly measured by site hits, and has been for several years now. Google was built on the simple concept that the more people flock to a source, the more value that source becomes all thanks to Google. It's a model that is now somewhat flawed due to the proliferation of differing media types and their availability through multiple channels of distribution. It's possible that Google recognizes this -- courtesy of the mounting lawsuits stemming from their Google Book idea -- but the fundamental notion that their secret formula algorithm begins with a baseline and subsequently benefits webmasters by quantifying web browsers alone is already outdated.
In the coming years, time-spent will dictate value, not page views. Google wasn't built for this, and I'm curious to see how they'll adjust. This isn't to say that some websites (such as extensive online dating services or online bidding services) will not continue to profit by the sheer quantity of eyeballs alone; but only to clarify that Google is just about ready to outgrow it's own method of measuring value.
Which also reminds me to question how far off a serious, federal anti-trust suit is, against Google. The company backed down from absorbing Yahoo for this reason, among others; but it seems inevitable now.
As far as information-sourcing is confirmed, I think it comes with the territory of online journalism. Journalists who publish online should be well aware of the perils of dropping a block of text on a webpage that can be lifted in the blink of an eye. Not that a writer shouldn't care where his content ends up; I'm simply saying that it's the writer or editor's obligation to be proactive in monitoring the life of the content after it's first five minutes of life. Doing so requires dancing with the devil and employing Google Analytics where necessary, and networking to ensure your authority on whatever content is published, is credible.
On the other end, readers should always care where information comes from. Just as it the writer's obligation to do their best to promote their legitimacy and expertise in a news category, it's similarly an obligation of the reader to validate/disprove the claims and efforts of said writer. Attribution and traffic from Huffington Post is fine, I'm sure, but if the aggregate site mis-quotes or mis-summarizes, then the situation turns on its head.
Posted by Aaron H. Bynum on Wed 15 Jul 2009 at 11:48 AM
Lol the corporate "free" press is the most biased, controlled and indoctrinating influence on society today. It deserves it's fate for allowing itself to be bought off by interest groups and trying to control the direction of public opinion by giving absolutely biased, "politically correct" and sensationalized opinions over truth.
Small independent newspapers with real, true content are not facing this problem, they still have a loyal core of subscribers both in print and online that don't need the search engine to check them regularly. Search engines only bring them more loyal subscribers because their content sells itself. It's the corporate media that thrived on giving people garbage propaganda like Michael Jackson's saintliness, Britney and Paris' and Hollywood's crazed burnout lifestyles (encouraging millions of innocent kids into stupid emulation), while ignoring true news like what people's congressmen were doing and how the American economy is being sold down the river by these bailouts and SIGs, that are suffering.
Posted by Rob on Thu 16 Jul 2009 at 03:46 AM
In order for me to take this news story seriously, I will need to see citations & links. There are no links anywhere in this story to give relevant and back-ground information. As such, I can only conclude that this story is a fluff-piece with no real data to back it up. With no supporting links, no information can be trusted in this article. This is not journalism ... it's opinion.
Posted by Alan on Thu 16 Jul 2009 at 02:38 PM
You don't want Google profiting from your content? Easy: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/07/working-with-news-publishers.html. That's all you need to do. But you do want Google to index you and you want them to pay at the same time? For the service they are providing to you? That doesn't make sense. And before everyone says there's no service... refer to the link above and disable the links.
Posted by Osno on Thu 16 Jul 2009 at 02:50 PM
"On September 29, 2008 ... NYTimes.com had 10 million visitors and 42.7 million page views"
The NY Times can't find a way to profit from 10 million visitors in a single day. How is this Google's fault?
SI "breaks" the story about A-rod using steroids. People go to Google and search and find a Huffington Post article based on an AP feed. Shouldn't SI be blaming the AP for giving away their valuable story to everyone who gets their feed? Why is it Google's fault if Huffington Post is better at the internet than SI? Barkers used to sell newspapers on the street corner. Did the best newspaper sell the most copies? Or did the best barker sell the most copies? Sorry SI, Huffington Post has a better barker. End of story.
If I go to Google to search for a news story like the A-rod steroid issue, it means I have already heard the news. Whether through the radio, television, twitter or a friend, I have already heard the news. Your rights to break the story are already gone. Someone else already broke the story to me. I go to Google for more information about someone I already heard, not for breaking news.
Newspapers need to stop trying to recreate a newspaper on the internet. It is a different medium. You might not have heard, but we are in the 21st century. Get with the times.
Posted by Pat B. on Thu 16 Jul 2009 at 03:55 PM
I don't understand. Didn't Sports Illustrated receive compensation from the Assocaited Press, which then allowed the Huffington Post to post it on its web site because they subscribe to the AP service? If so, then SI received compensation for its story appearing on the Huffington Post web site.
How is this different than if the Washington Post breaks a huge story, and the next day the Podunk Register sells more newspapers because they include the story, which they got through AP? Would you complain that the stores in Podunk, which mostly don't stock the Washington Post, need to pony up money to the Post as "fair compensation"?
If SI is upset with the fact that selling their story to AP meant that web traffic went to the Huffington Post, then they need to revist their relationship with AP, not complain about Google.
Posted by bluebearr on Thu 16 Jul 2009 at 04:03 PM
Huffington should pay for SI because it's their content, that they went to the expense to get and paid journalists to write. The pipes for how it got there don't matter -- they are mere pipes and not special. The SEO tricks that aggregators use, lawful and unlawful, are mere pipes, and not content, and shouldn't be confused. Cynical, entitlement-happy readers keep confusing the pipes with the content -- Google will fall if it cannot find a way to get content makers paid and not just make pipes pay to mainly its own advantage.
The cynical indifference to how content gets made, and the privileging of the pipe delivering it is an infantile stage of the Internet when everything is free because it's still a loss leader. Ads do not pay for online content in the way they used to pay for the paper editions -- there are too many easily delivered, too many competing, and people have less tolerance to view them. So media will have to find other ways to get paid through subscriptions, like cable, and like the monthly fee to play World of Warcraft. If teenagers can pay $15.95 to play a game, adults can surely pay $9.95 to read some newspapers.
The online news operations will have to figure out a way to develop an online wallet with credits, perhaps by creating virtual currencies that are purchased on exchanges and which are then able to be sold back for dollars, so that people have huge flexibility -- it's the cumbersome of pay-per-view that is a deterrent right now. With a wallet, they could then both pay micropayments for articles, and pay for services such as the ability to leave comments and/or interact in live meetings with editors and journalists, and pay for specialized extra content -- as well as pay to offer tips to bloggers.
When that online ecosystem can get developed as it is developed in the virtual world of Second Life where micropayments work robustly and well and help people to monetarize time online, then we will see the salvation of the content industry.
And save it we must, because looking at the chat and ads at Craigslist.com, which helped destroyed the classifieds at the New York Times and other papers, is not a substitute for reading the real news.
Posted by Prokofy Neva on Sat 18 Jul 2009 at 02:11 AM
Alan, are you a journalism student? You need to learn that a piece like this is a column or op-ed piece and isn't presenting itself as news, and that's clear. It is marshalling facts, to be sure, but making an informed opinion. You don't have to have footnotes or links in a piece of opinion -- unless, of course, you've taken your ideas from somewhere else. Links aren't *mandatory* but can be used at the author's and publisher's discretion.
Peter Osnos is a senior authority, a veteran publisher. People link TO him. The idea that he has to link to other people that presumably he "got these ideas from" let's us know how some students write their term papers. Peter Osnos is an original thinker.
Google is ultimately duplicitous in the way it serves up information because it shows us what is already the most linked -- and that's a self-fulfilling prophecy as the sites the most skilled at SEO manipulation can then get links in to all the blogs that echo them. That's not a measure of value or newsworthyness or even particular skill at curating the best stories. It's a measure of SEO manipulation with key words and various tricks. That's why there have been some calls for Google to make its SEO formulas transparent so that they no longer hold essentially a monopoly over news aggregation which they aggressively use to sell their ads.
Google is an ad agency. The privileging and feting of this ad agency to the harm of other business and to the exclusion of others is what the U.S. government and Congress should be investigating. It's a very good thing that publishers are now fighting back. The trouble is that they are somewhat hampered in that fight by not fully understanding the ideological underpinnings of what is happening (Kevin Kelly of Wired quite properly describes it as a communist revolution) and also not being able to join together (because of fears of media concentration and laws about cartels). Meanwhile Google, and its preferred ideological partners can aggregate everybody, increasingly with tools like Twitter.
The AP is a non-profit service. It sells stories to newspapers to reprint to cover its costs but it is not a profit-making venture. It helps move news and enable newspapers without bureaus to get the advantage of the work of reports in places where they cannot get. The Internet itself began to serve that function, and yet AP was still valued for its skillful newsgathering and editing functions. No one should be telling SI or AP to go change something as they a) provided the content by paying for the cost of gathering it and producing it and b) provided the non-profit rates to move that content around. It's the socialite-funded and faddish Huffpo that hustles eyeballs to its servers by heavily politicized commentary that should be paying up for the content it values, because it helps drive more eyeballs to its blogs and ads.
Google's indexing is highly distorted by SEO manipulation and even Google's own ideological tinkering which it has done, for example, on stories from China in its news feeds.
This snarky admonition to respected news operations to "get with the times" because they don't manipulate SEO and glue eyeballs by tendentious commentary will eventually lead to the newspapers going away -- we are already seeing that. Then what kind of nation do we have? A nation raised on Huffpo and gawker.com is not a civil society.
Posted by Prokofy Neva on Sat 18 Jul 2009 at 02:48 AM
BTW, it's hugely interesting to follow what Google does about its own perceived rights to its own content and its own proprietary interest in keeping viewers on its own owned sites, rather than have them wander off to, er, the best aggregators using the free tool of Google. Then there's a double standard, and this cynical argument about "may the best aggregator on Google win" no longer applies.
YouTube is owned by Google, and no doubt it loses some money or at least has not quite figured out how to make YouTube pay, given the propensity for everyone to wish to have YouTube videos for free, and their tendency to copy anything and everything to share with friends and/or mash-up in to amateur content, but not follow the prompting of ads to go and buy the music or film offered.
So recently in particular with the death of Walter Conkrite, YouTube clips of his broadcasts from 1968, say, of the assassination of Kennedy or the Moon Walk which were copied and embedded on blogs about his death began showing a notice to the reader: that at the request of YouTube this copy had been removed but that you could go and view it on YouTube. So that meant that you were forced to leave that blog you were reading, of the type like Huffpo, and be driven back to the YouTube website to view that content, where you would also be forced to see the ads that YouTube served up to you. And if YouTube has bought rights to content, or feels that it has paid for the pipes to deliver that content to you and enable you to share it, then it wants to control how you come and go from the page and evidently on certain high-traffic items, you will be forced to come back to them to see their ads.
But what's good for the goose should be good for the gander.
Posted by Prokofy Neva on Sat 18 Jul 2009 at 01:58 PM
Did you notice that Microsoft and Yahoo are partnering up to use the same search engine - it will be interesting to see if they can compete with Google - while I do love Google, I think we can certainly use the competition.
Carl
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Posted by Carl on Sat 1 Aug 2009 at 12:31 AM
Did anyone notice the partnership that was announced this week between Microsoft Bing and Yahoo search? It will be interesting to see if they can catch up in a search engine market that The Big G dominates.
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Posted by carl on Sat 1 Aug 2009 at 12:33 AM
Excellent article. I liked the part where you whined about Google for four pages. The pseudo-intellectual rhetoric was almost convincing enough to pass as journalism. Really, I haven't heard this rant hundreds of times. Man, the NAA should call up the RIAA and go drinking together. Maybe then they can call the Associated Press too, and wallow in all their collective ineptitude.
I believe Aristotle put it most wisely: "Kids, the internet will not adapt to you. You must adapt to the internet."
Posted by Declin on Fri 7 Aug 2009 at 12:13 PM