What Is Australia's Problem With News in Google and Facebook

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I mostly disagree

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It is clearly a fact that casual visitors, unwilling to take out subscriptions will no longer visit the site. That is exactly what I have done with NYT and WaPo.

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The effect of paywalls on traffic will vary widely across the various news outlets. Just poking around a little about the Boston Globe I see that total circulation (print+digital) has increased since 2016. Paid print circulation peaked in 2016 at 136,000, but paid digital circulation recently surpassed 200,000

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None of which offers any real evidence that web views have not declined as a consequence. If they didn’t get casual visits from Facebook users or Google searches I would be surprised (and it would also be a relevant point in the discussion). And I hardly think that every one of those casual visitors would have taken out a paid subscription.

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I got the sense that you might think that news outlets invariably prefer the subscription model to ads, and if so then I disagree.

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I think that it is quite clear that many do, and the fact that ads are not paying well - for them - is a big part of that. That is one of the underlying issues - ad spending online is heavily dominated by Google and Facebook, who receive a very large proportion of it.

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Whether or not it was "your point," it was still something you said that I disagreed with. If you think you were misinterpreted then maybe you were - people are misinterpreted billions of times a day with absolutely no nefarious intent or involvement of stupidity.

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It is the continued insistence that I said it, despite repeated corrections which is the issue. An honest mistake I can accept, but we’ve gone a long way past the point where that is a possibility,

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Even if it was "completely irrelevant to your actual point" (and I don't believe it was), why does that matter? Discussions always tend to range around, and it was completely relevant to the point I was making when I opened this thread.

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It is certain that it is irrelevant, since the point was only about the finances. I don’t even agree that subscriptions make the newspaper a destination site - at least no more of one than it already is (Does my regular reading of the BBC News site make it a destination site? Links to WaPo and NYT are common in my reading - why would subscriptions make them more of a destination site when they reduce the number of people following those links?)

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If you mean that it is a benefit to paywall websites for search engines to index them, I said this myself and so of course I agree.

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What I mean, of course, is that it is a way around the issue of search, undercutting your objection.

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Poor search wasn't offered as the central deficiency of paywall news sites but as an example of how they're not putting enough effort into becoming destination sites (i.e., self-contained, not reliant on outside websites

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Thank you for making it clear that your assertion has nothing to do with my point. My whole point is about financing. Casual visitors generally don’t provide sufficient income, hence newspapers prefer subscriptions. And if they can’t get subscriptions to work they will have to look for other ways, whether the site is self-contained or not doesn’t matter. (I also note that a destination site is generally expected to contain substantial links to other resources - which is a reliance on other sites).

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Very true. That pretty much describes my own behavior. I think I already mentioned that I tell Google not to list links to paywall news sites that I don't subscribe to.

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So why do you disagree with the idea that they are getting fewer eyeballs on ads ?

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I don't know whether overall web traffic to news sites is increasing or decreasing, and I wasn't trying to say anything about that.

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The subject was eyeballs on ads and unless you can say that subscriptions produce enough extra impressions to counteract the loss from excluding non-subscribers - which you didn’t even try to discuss - I think that web traffic is much more on point than numbers of subscribers,

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I couldn't develop a clear picture of what you were saying here. If it seems an important point then could you please clarify?

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That was support for the idea that web traffic and therefore eyeballs on ads had decreased as a result of going subscription-only.

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Why do you think that part of Google's income from AdSense ads at EvC Forum (if we ran any) should be given to the Australian news media?

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I don’t think that and I have been very clear that I oppose the legislation. Explaining the background does NOT mean supporting the supposed solution.

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But you did say that "newspapers generally don't want to rely on visitors arriving via links."

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As a source of income. Subscriptions don’t dictate how visitors arrive at a particular story but they do contribute to income (even if they’re free). Read it in context.

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I think in your mind that your words contained a focus and precision that did not in reality exist

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The reality includes the context. However much you wish it didn’t.

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If you think search engine links benefit paywall news sites then why did you say they don't want to rely on them?

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I said that they preferred subscriptions to people simply arriving through links. It’s pretty obvious that subscription-only sites don’t have non-subscribers simply arriving through links. Context. It’s important.

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By "they" I assume you mean subscriber sites, and of course I believe that raising a paywall should reduce web traffic and result in fewer eyeballs on ads, at least initially

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And yet you mostly disagreed.

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I think you often find yourself believing, independent of how others might be experiencing the discussion, that the conversation is about "this, this, this and only this." Earlier when you insisted the subject was finances, finances, finances and only finances, it wasn't, and right now the subject isn't just "eyeballs on ads."

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Well when I experience you saying The effect of paywalls on traffic will vary widely across the various news outlets. I expect the immediately following text in the paragraph to elaborate on the effects of paywalls on traffic. Apparently you expect significant and unsignalled changes of subject mid-paragraph. At least when it is convenient to you to say that you did.

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I'm sorry for seeming to ascribe a position to you that you don't hold, but the way you presented it lent the impression that you believe it's a valid point that Google and Facebook receive too large a proportion of total online ad revenue.

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It is relevant that advertising spend has shifted from the newspapers and to Facebook and Google. It is one of the reasons behind the law. That doesn’t mean that I support the law, especially after saying:

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I did read it in context, it's still wrong, and I still disagree. News sites love every single way that traffic is directed to their sites. Subscription sites don't care whether you arrive at an article via a link on their front page or a via a link at Google News.

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So you didn’t read it in context and what I said is still correct.

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If the focus and precision were present in the writing then the context you imagine was there would be clear to others.

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I say that it is. Which is why you rely on quoting it out of context.
Even though you can’t tell what rely on means without it.

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But non-subscribers do arrive at paywall sites via links.

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And - at WaPo - get nothing but a page telling them to subscribe. And then they don’t bother clicking the links when they notice where they go. The NYT may be a bit more generous but the effect is similar. And doesn’t really do much for revenue,

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But I didn't disagree with that at all. "I mostly disagree" was just the beginning of three paragraphs in Message 45 that described the details of what I was disagreeing with.

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Well there is a big problem there. When you quote material from my post and directly follow with I mostly disagree it means that you mostly disagree with the quoted text. The paragraphs that follow should explain why you disagree, not identify different things you disagree with.

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I think it would work better if we focused on the topic. Misunderstandings and misinterpretations happen all the time in discussions, aren't unusual, and shouldn't become a major distraction. I don't think either of us is going to convince the other about it and we should let it go. I think we each were assuming the other would eventually see reason, but that's just not happening.

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You are the one that has dragged it out by repeatedly insisting on a misrepresentation after it was corrected. Maybe you should ask yourself why you would do something so obviously counter-productive.

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That's irrelevant and not an actual reason. Any news outlet that uses AdSense gets 68% of the revenue, Google 32%. I think around 3/4 of Alphabet annual revenue is from AdSense. AdSense has competition, like Media.net and Amazon Ads. Plenty of news media sites, including Australian ones, probably use AdSense, or maybe the premium version called Ad Exchange or something like that. News media sites that don't think the 68/32 split is fair to them can go with another ad company or build their own ad system.

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I note that you offer nothing to dispute either of the points you contest.I think the fact that the newspapers lose nearly a third of the revenue from ads they host, on top of ad spending going on elsewhere is rather relevant,

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Why do you think it was correct to say that news sites don't want visitors to rely on outside links?

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So much for droppingThat’s not what I said. What I said was that the newspapers do not want to rely on people just turning up for revenue.So despite suggesting that the matter be dropped, you try to fan the flames by repeating the same misrepresentation again.OK that’s it. You’re just trolling now. So there really isn’t any point in trying to discuss this, is there? Not after such blatant bad faith.