But that was also a huge factor in the public’s rapid infatuation with google in the first place, don’t you think?

But that was also a huge factor in the public’s rapid infatuation with google in the first place, don’t you think?

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/google-developing-a-micropayment-platform-and-pitching-newspapers-open-need-not-mean-free/

I just read a German study that for 95 % of all searches there is no content from a traditional publisher on Google Page #1 – Wikipedia alone is more than 2 times bigger than all German publishers together in those SERPs. People search a lot more and different topics than publishers think of.

If traditional publishers go away others will fill the small slots – very special sites, blogs, forums, new publishing houses.

I don’t know about your understanding, but I see similar exclusives everywhere. I also see AP.

On a more tactical note, who is going to bring the anti-trust action? Google? The DOJ on Google’s behalf?

As far as “collective action”, if they don’t own/run the news search engine, that’s a tough argument to make. They use common suppliers today and one could easily make a biz argument for every one of them taking the same action.

Collusion requires that they actually agree. It’s not collusion to all take a better deal.

> we agree that it’s probably worth less to someone else.

My point is that the question is irrelevant.

However, it’s not clear that news is worth less to someone else, or rather, that a news search engine will get less revenue than Google currently gets on comparable searches.

The price of a given keyword on a pay-per-click basis. that is, Adwords, depends on the audience and the context. Even if you assume the same audience (and I’d argue that many of the folks who don’t follow the news sources are worth less than folks who do), the newspaper folks argue that their results are more valuable context than the riff-raff Google also serves for such queries.

If that’s true, Google may not be able to afford the same deal that the news search engine can make the newspapers because advertisers will be willing to pay the news search engine more than Google for news relevant keywords. Google could split the adwords market and make it possible for advertisers to bind on “news pages only”, but that’s a giant can of worms.

Anyway, I see your point now: I thought you were equating what news search was worth to Google to what it would be worth to someone else, and we agree that it’s probably worth less to someone else.

As for why news organizations aren’t encouraging or developing a separate news search engine with exclusive access to their content, I think it’s a combination of fear of being sued for anti-competitive behavior (because they would have to act collectively to make this strategy work) and cowardice–even though they know they’re in a death spiral, they don’t want to let go of their current revenue model to try a new one. The latter problem, assuming I am diagnosing it correctly, doesn’t earn any sympathy from me.

As I wrote above, I think that the value of news to Google is irrelevant in this discussion.

> You take a reductionist attitude, acting as if news is worth just as much outside the full search bundle as inside it.

Considering that I said that news search outside Google would have fewer searchers, the basis for that statement is unclear.

I’ll be clear. I think that news outside a full search bundle is worth less. However, that doesn’t imply that a news search engine isn’t viable, especially if it gets exclusives. The viability of a news search engine depends only on how much traffic it can get and how valuable that traffic is.

News organizations insist that they have exclusive access to valuable content. If that’s true, a news search engine that has exclusive access would be incredibly lucrative. That money could be used to pay for exclusive access, giving newspapers what they want.

The fact that news organizations aren’t encouraging or developing such a biz tells us that they’re pretty sure that their content is not all that valuable.

> The AP notwithstanding, it’s not clear they are allowed to do this today

“allowed” by whom?

In that, journalists are exactly like an SEO marketer. The only difference is in how they claim that Google is hurting them.

So, we should just ignore what’s going on? What’s your advice?

Our bigger point of disagreement is on the value of news to Google. You take a reductionist attitude, acting as if news is worth just as much outside the full search bundle as inside it. But isn’t it the case that news has often serves as a loss leader for media companies which make up for it in more lucrative verticals (like classifieds)? Not that Google is a media company in the traditional sense, but I’d say it’s doing the same–and that’s why Google has invested significantly in news search despite having little hope of making that segment profitable as a stand-alone unit.

That said, I do think the newspaper industry would have leverage if it cut off Google (and yes, from the other search engines too) en masse, whether in order to set up a stand-alone news search engine or to create a bidding war for access. The AP notwithstanding, it’s not clear they are allowed to do this today–or that they’d have the cojones to pull it off even if they are allowed.

Actually the problem is the opposite: Jeff Jarvis doesn’t really like it when people read buzzmachine carefully and ask too many questions. At this point, the adapt-or-die argument sounds like very oversimplified and arrogant.

No. that is your misunderstanding. Try to read more carefully this time:

Media oligarchs thought their de facto monopoly was permanent, because of the high cost of entry. The Internet made their assumptions obsolete, because the cost of entry is nil. The oligarchs can’t adapt to competition. So they are failing.

You can keep on cursing Google in all caps like a crank, or adapt to the new environment.