The Tussle Between Newspaper Publishers And Google – A Report
Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, had to visit a convention of newspaper executives to put to rest the tension surrounding newspaper industry in the US which is accusing Google of succeeding at their expense.
What’s the publishers take?
The publishers are up in arms with Google news service and various other services where Google derives monetary benefits by showing search results with a simple snippets of text.
Their reasoning is that at a time when the industry has been severly hit by declining ad sales and rising input and other costs google should in general share the revenues with them.
They also believe it’s Google who is dependent on them rather than vice-versa. Even, Media owner Rupert Murdoch has questioned if aggregators like Google should pay to use content.
What’s Google’s take?
Google has put off this argument by saying that it is doing nothing wrong as it does not host the content on its servers unless it is from a content partner like Associated Press and just redirects the traffic by showing a little snippet enough for users to see if they want to read the news.
They even mentioned that they have an association with AP – one of the disputant to host and show the news results in search with a multi-million dollar deal in place.
Another argument put forth by google says that newspaper publishers are deriving traffic tuning to billion clicks/month which should be making serious money for publishers although full potential is not realized due to inability on publisher’s side.
Outsell estimates Google is responsible for 20% to 30% of the traffic on the average newspaper web site, but the online newspaper business remains only a thin slice of the Industry’s revenue base.
It also argues that the newspaper publishers should change their attitude and be more liberal in content sharing and modern content viewing rather than just using traditional methods.
The main envy point for newspaper publishers is the Google reporting a 31% revenue increase last year to $21.8 billion, while newspapers overall lost roughly $5 billion in ad revenue, and the industry has been savaged by a rash of bankruptcies, job losses and closings.
In future they are even open to take action against other aggregators like techmeme, digg and for that matter they are even trying to put in place their own search engine with AP taking the lead.
This litigation could arise many other similar cases from blogging majors or other portals. Although google is doing nothing wrong but benefitting from the work it does by solving the online search problems.
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You’re right! Google isn’t doing anything wrong by displaying text ads on the search pages. That’s how it makes money. Also, as the publishers are getting a fair share of hits from google news which compensates the case of publishers not getting monetary benefits.