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Author | Topic: What Is Australia's Problem With News in Google and Facebook | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
The basics are simple.
Facebook and Google make lots of money from advertising. The newspapers used to make lots of money from advertising, but don’t any more. The Murdoch organisation is really upset about that.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3
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Facebook IS saying exactly that. They’ve gone rather further in retaliation against the Australian government (and I don’t support that) but that’s the reason Facebook is banning news links and content in Australia.
Google, on the other hand, does need the news media, so they are trying to find a compromise. Searches for news items is a big enough part of Google’s business - not to mention Google News - that it would be painful to give up.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
No. Some news organisations choose to post on Facebook, and the rest is all links. Facebook is not engaged in anything shady there. There isn’t any real justification for the proposed law that I can see.
It’s surprising to find Facebook in the right, but it seems to be the case.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: I don’t think Google exactly caved - they went to negotiations. But they obviously needed the news media enough that simply banning links was not their preferred option.
quote: Because they aren’t making enough. And it’s no secret that newspapers tend to lose money.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: They tried to negotiate a better arrangement than they would likely get if the government got involved. Yes, they’ve made concessions but I don’t see it as a complete surrender.
quote: Newspaper’s have struggled to make their web presence pay, so it’s not clear how much benefit they get from visits. And it isn’t clear how much Google drives visits. I look at the BBC website much more often than I search for news stories.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
Apple News+ may be the sort of thing you want. Maybe not exactly, but it’s in the ballpark.
But I will note that the preference for subscriptions argues against links being a major benefit to newspapers. To maintain the value of subscriptions necessarily means limiting the amount of free content which will result in some links being blocked for some people. The newspapers generally don’t want to rely on visitors arriving via links.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
That is largely a diversion. That the newspaper’s sites have problems doesn’t change the financial situation. It seems that subscriptions pay better than views from links - whether those links are found via search or Facebook postings. (The question of how Google News fits into it is also important.)
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: No, the issue I raised was that newspapers didn’t seem to find adequate benefit from link referrals.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: I didn’t raise that as an issue. As I have already told you.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
Percy, my point was about the finances, as should have been clear from the context.
The first sentence of the short paragraph you refer to:
But I will note that the preference for subscriptions argues against links being a major benefit to newspapers
(Message 13) I also explained this in Message 19 and briefly again in Message 21 Got it?
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: The issue is not your agreement with the point. The issue is that point IS the point in the sentence you chose to quote.
quote: We are back to the question of context. Indeed it comes back to your statement:
Many news sites plead with visitors to subscribe
That is what I was talking about, Please don’t assume that I’m talking about every newspaper because it just doesn’t make sense. They are too many and too varied for one-size-fits-all.
quote: It’s not a just answer but it seems to be a popular one. And it is the motivation behind the Australian legal proposals.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: Presumably you mean every other thing in the short paragraph you extracted the quoted sentence from. But that isn’t absurd. If you mean anything much more, however, it is your claim that is absurd.
quote: I have no idea how you come up with that bizarre nonsense. My point is that you falsely attributed a claim to me, based on a sentence you took out of context. I don’t think there is anything unreasonable in objecting to that. Especially when you ignore multiple corrections.
quote: Except that you commented on a claim that I had not made. As I have repeatedly pointed out.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: Well, it’s because you went off on a completely irrelevant track.
quote: Neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times provide unfettered access to articles. At least not to Europeans. You have to sign up to see any stories. I haven’t read a WaPo or NYT story in months because of that.
quote: The newspapers don’t seem to share your opinion.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: And yet you are the one who insisted on dragging it on and on.
quote: Presumably you mean that they provide sufficient access for the search engines’ web crawlers to find and index the news stories. Which may well fall short of full access. And, of course, the fact that the links provided by the search engines are useless to non-subscribers is a significant limit on access. And one that is especially relevant since it applies to Facebook who are not a search engine, but are a major part of the issue. However the fact that the links found are useless to people who don’t subscribe reinforces my point. Indeed, it shows that they have a way around the problem of poor search on their sites - one of your objections. On the points where we disagree that access supports my views rather than yours.
quote: Without signing up I get none, not two.
quote: But the position is not clearly irrational or unsupportable. The newspapers do make far less advertising money than Facebook or Google and it has hurt their income. Eyeballs on ads don’t seem to be enough.
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PaulK Member Posts: 17826 Joined: Member Rating: 2.3 |
quote: The point that newspapers prefer subscriptions to just letting people arrive via links ? Remember that they are reducing the number of eyeballs on ads by going subscription-only.
quote: That wasn’t my point. So thanks for demonstrating that you are the one who keeps dragging it up unnecessarily again, and again.
quote: Which was completely irrelevant to my actual point - and as we see letting the search engines index the sites helps, too. Not to mention the point I already made that poor search doesn’t stop me from regularly reading the BBC News site - more frequently than I use search engines to find news.
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