Google To Pay Publishers $1 Billion Over Three Years For Their News (reuters.com) 26
Hmmmmmm shares a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google plans to pay $1 billion to publishers globally for their news over the next three years, its CEO said on Thursday. The move could help it win over a powerful group amid heightened regulatory scrutiny worldwide. CEO Sundar Pichai said the new product called Google News Showcase will launch first in Germany, where it has signed up German newspapers including Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, and in Brazil with Folha de S.Paulo, Band and Infobae. It will be rolled out in Belgium, India, the Netherlands and other countries. About 200 publishers in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Brazil, Canada and Germany have signed up to the product.
"This financial commitment -- our biggest to date -- will pay publishers to create and curate high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience," Pichai said in a blog post. The product, which allows publishers to pick and present their stories, will launch on Google News on Android devices and eventually on Apple devices. "This approach is distinct from our other news products because it leans on the editorial choices individual publishers make about which stories to show readers and how to present them," Pichai said. The product builds on a licensing deal with media groups in Australia, Brazil and Germany in June, which also drew a lukewarm response from the European Publishers Council. Google is negotiating with French publishers, among its most vocal critics, while Australia wants to force it and Facebook to share advertising revenue with local media groups.
"This financial commitment -- our biggest to date -- will pay publishers to create and curate high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience," Pichai said in a blog post. The product, which allows publishers to pick and present their stories, will launch on Google News on Android devices and eventually on Apple devices. "This approach is distinct from our other news products because it leans on the editorial choices individual publishers make about which stories to show readers and how to present them," Pichai said. The product builds on a licensing deal with media groups in Australia, Brazil and Germany in June, which also drew a lukewarm response from the European Publishers Council. Google is negotiating with French publishers, among its most vocal critics, while Australia wants to force it and Facebook to share advertising revenue with local media groups.
Indeed (Score:2)
1 billion for 3 years is 333 million divided by 200 countries is around 1,5 million per country so each news agency can be expected to get about 1500 bucks or so.
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There has ot be some self interest sooner or later (Score:3)
I mean it's a great wheeze to scrape news from lots of organisations, present it to your users and along with your own ads so you can reap all the benefits of their work, and they get nothing. But if you're too big and do it too much, you'll eventually put them out of business and then there's less stuff for you to show your users while you also advertise to them.
Also, people might start to get pissed off with you.
I'm sure there'll be a bunch of "bUt ItS oN tHe InTerNeT" style arguments abut robots.txt and whatever. Just because something is currently technically legal doesn't mean that it's not a dick move or even good for google in the long term. Or even the medium term. A capitalist society contains people who will chase money to the exclusion of all else, and laws to stop them messing up the place completely while they do so. Google's leaning on the former but they've also realised they are very close to triggering the latter.
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The truth is that news-aggregation drives more traffic to news-sites as evidenced by the extreme drop in traffic to news-sites in Spain when Google pulled out.
So how do you propose a site should go about telling Googl
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Read this and agreed:
"Just because something is currently technically legal doesn't mean that it's not a dick move or even good"
Then read your sig and same principle applies. Getting someone fired because they voted for "the other guy" is a dick move and not good. Blasphemy is the original Cancel Culture.
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Right, burning someone at the stake is exactly the same as not watching someone's show/not burying their shit while whining about it on Twitter.
Christ you're a delicate snowflake.
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I mean it's a great wheeze to scrape news from lots of organisations, present it to your users and along with your own ads so you can reap all the benefits of their work, and they get nothing.
Sorry what? You can't read the article without clicking through to their website. You have no idea what you're talking about. They get more traffic like any other website that shows up on a google search result.
A matter, of Trust. (Score:2)
"This approach is distinct from our other news products because it leans on the editorial choices individual publishers make about which stories to show readers and how to present them,"
So this is basically being sold, as the anti-Telescreen.
From one of the world's largest Telescreen providers.
Hey Product. You sure you want to go there with Trust again? I'd READ that EULA this time.
Oh, and I find it hilarious that Google is giving some of the taxes they dodged back to fund this, as if that's supposed to be some kind of gift to taxpayers. A billion Google? Make it $100 billion if you're serious about Effecting Change, and stop trying to impress with what the janitor scraped from the Goo
And Anti-Trust (Score:4, Interesting)
Google has finally learned that, now they are paying for news, news sites can effectively block out any competition to Google's on-line news aggregation monopoly. The price tag for competing with Google in this space has just been set at $1 billion dollars. Good luck start-ups!
Time to eat crow? (Score:2)
Time to eat crow? Or are you allowed to call it bread? [slashdot.org]
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So Google isn't going to stop indexing all the media after all. Like so many here predicted.
Time to eat crow?
That's not how negotiations works.
Google has always had enough money to lose on any number of operations to attempt to ensure that competitors don't have a chance in that market.
How long after Google acquired YouTube from the VC's was it that it started turning a profit? It's only been in the past few years that anybody else has even attempted to compete.
Making a billion dollars the low-bar for be
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I commented on this very subject in August (https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=16982629&cid=60409941):
Imagine if Google starts to buy up more and more news from publishers and
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Imagine if Google starts to buy up more and more news from publishers and put it on their news-site, what will the effect be on news-sites in general? Their traffic will decline and more revenue for Google.
The news sites that they buy from will have money they can use to write more news.
Google was already taking the news and viewers anyway.
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The news sites that they buy from will have money they can use to write more news.
Perhaps, we haven't seen the details of the deal they have struck. My question is about those sites not having a sweetheart-deal with Google.
Google was already taking the news and viewers anyway.
You do realize that you actually can't read the news on Google, Google redirects you to the news-site when you click a headline which means that they actually give the sites more viewers which means your statement is wrong.
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You have a point with Google picking the winners in that scenario. It does allow their power to increase.
The news sites are already complaining Google is taking away their viewers. So enough people are not clicking through to go to the news sites already. Enough for them to claim it's been a problem in the first place. Maybe the headlines and summary is enough for many people?
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I'm not defending Google here, but what they do to aggregate the news and how it's done on facebook seem rather different. I use google for news on my phone specifically with chrome. I open a tab and just start scrolling and clicking the interesting articles, that go straight to the news site. I sometimes even find additional links on the news site to other articles.
At no point has google presented me an ad unless they were selling ads on the news site as well. The feed doesn't have ads on it.
I admit there
$1 Billion (Score:3)
Copyright (Score:1)
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Because they NEED Google. People don't make news agencies their home page.
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Go to news.google.com
Do you see any ads?
Can you read any of text from a news-story at google?
Does a headline constitute a news-story?
If all of the above is answered with "no", does your argument then have merit?
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Because news agencies aren't flush with cash, Google can argue fair use and keep this tied up in court for years. Nobody is going to bankrupt themselves on principle.
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Three days revenue (Score:2)
That's about three days worth of revenue for Google. They really have to dig deep.