Yet another example of why the mainstream media is doomed to obscelecence:
Google is supposed to make it easier for newspaper readers to find content online. But some in the industry are questioning whether it makes business sense to allow Google to use their material for free.
"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" Sam Zell, the new owner of the Tribune Company, asked reporters during a speech at Stanford University last month. The Tribune Company operates the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.
Zell didn't wait for the reporters to reply, according to The Washington Post. "Not very," he said.
At a time when anyone with a blog can compete against vast media empires for readership, newspapers may be taking a harder look at their relationship with search engines and sites that aggregate headlines. The question some analysts are asking of media companies is: what's taken so long?
They have a very loose definition of what it means to steal, if they honestly call indexing their content and providing a small excerpt stealing. Not only is that not stealing, but it is the sort of behavior that adds value to their content by providing just enough of it to validate that it is what the user wants, without giving it away for nothing. Content that is not easily accessed is naturally going to lose a significant amount of its value as a good to the company that produces it, so it makes no business sense for them to discourage Google from providing the public with an effective way to find the content they are looking for.
Would Google be profitable without the content published by the mainstream media? Absolutely! They would still connect people to blog posts, academic papers, product reviews, help people find businesses, and a whole lot more information. The information provided by the mainstream media is only a subset of what Google indexes that people value. Google would certainly take a hit, but it would be a drop in the bucket compared to how bad it would be if Google simply dropped certain greedy media outlets from its index.
And here is what makes it so ironic for them to question whether or not it makes business sense:
Observers note that with newspapers receiving about 25 percent of their traffic from search engines, losing Google's traffic had to sting.
If you lose twenty five percent of your audience, it doesn't take a genius to realize that your ability to command high advertising rates and revenues is going to drop accordingly.
Leave a comment