Good morning, Search Marketer, let's pick up where we left off.
Last Wednesday morning, I laid out a few reasons why it's unreasonable to force Google to pay to link to publishers in the main search results. Instead, Google has been pushing its News Showcase as a mechanism to compensate news publishers.
Since then, Seven West Media (which owns 21 publications) has become the largest Australian news media organization to get on board with News Showcase. In France, News Showcase has evoked mixed reactions: "These opaque agreements don't ensure the fair treatment of all news publishers, since the calculation formula isn't made public," Spiil, the union for independent online news publishers, told Reuters, "Google took advantage of our divisions to advance its interests."
To Spiil's point, there are clearly differing opinions within the industry. I opened up my inbox for your thoughts on this as well, and the responses were diverse:
- "Why segregate and discriminate against other websites? If Google needs to pay for news links, then the next step is that Google needs to pay for ALL ORGANIC links." – Bruce C.
- "Personally, I think that Google should just stop indexing all news websites (or possibly all websites) in Australia. They should not even be entertaining solutions with them as this will become a slippery slope setting a precedence for other industries to demand payment for links to their content." – Jim H.
- "Google scrapes content off the entire web, sells it back to us using snippets under the guise of copyright fair use, and then tells the rest of the world that doing exactly the same is against their guidelines. The world will be a much better place if this animal was brought under control." – D. Johnson.
- "Resources like Google and Facebook, which are reliant on other people's content to serve user needs, should be issuing ad credits for content that performs organically. It's insane that they don't as they provide such a value." – Drew A.
What if Google tried that last idea? It would keep publishers advertising on its platform, but would the influx of advertising credits to the news sector just make for much more expensive ads? How would that impact non-news advertisers? And, surely, there would still need to be some form of traditional compensation…coupons and impressions aren't going to be enough to pay your employees. It's fun to think about, but unlikely to happen. Whatever course Google, the publishers and regulators end up taking, I'll be sure to keep you posted.
George Nguyen,
Editor
