Lance Wiggs posted today about someone stealing content from his blog for the purpose of republishing the content on their own site to generate revenue from the associated Google Ads.
The offending site responded positively to Lance’s request to remove his content but also pointed out that their actions were not dissimilar to the actions of Google with their Google News service. (FYI Google News is a new aggregation service that pulls headlines from a variety of publishers so you can get all your news from the one place).
It reminded me of a comment one of the Mighty Ape developers made last week in response to Stuff.co.nz displaying an ad that temporarily took over the entire screen thus masking the content for a few seconds. I’m paraphrasing here but it was something along the lines of “Screw you stuff – switching to Google News.”
So…just because Google News pulls the content in a similar way to the site that Lance took offense to…does that make it right?
I’d argue it doesn’t.
Google News takes traffic away from publishers by “stealing” and republishing content within a news aggregation site where the original publisher has no opportunity to make revenue from ad sales.
Content is expensive to produce. Hiring researchers, reporters, editors and photographers isn’t cheap and in today’s world of declining newspaper sales these publishers will be looking more and more at recouping their investment through online ad sales. Some might stay that Stuff and the nzherald accepting ads that temporarily take over the entire screen may seem daft and short sighted and they’re probably right, but on the other hand some might argue that publishers who pay money to create their own content cant afford the luxury of having that opinion. Wages need to be paid somehow.
In conclusion I’d argue that Google News takes traffic and eye balls away from the publisher…thus reducing their revenues. If I were a publisher I’d be nervous.
[...] My friend Dylan also contributed to the discussion and I left a largish comment on his post during lunch, which was consequently munged into an unreadable wall of text So I decided to post my reply here… [...]
and interestingly I’m a bit miffed because I can’t add your blog to Google reader. Thank goodness for Twitter.
The flipside to your idea is your content may have people read it who may not of otherwise gone to your site and seen the content.
Visitors like it (news aggregators) as it makes news vendors independent, ie, if you are interested in a topic, you don’t have to hunt through a dozen news sites to see more info on it. I totally agree, however, that this can take valuable advertising revenue from the original site.
Does it really? Google News only displays the first sentence (maybe the first two) and provides a link to the source. It is just like the search results, only based on a defined set of authoritative sources and arranged by recency. If you were a featured news source would you really want to be removed from that? It would be kinda like excluding yourself from the search results, no?
IMHO, in this age of information abundance we need search and discovery mechanisms which is what I see Google News as, and in that context I think they provide ample value to publishers.
Oops, I tried block quoting those first two lines from your post, but html stripped.
@nate @chris @charles you all of course make excellent points. However I still believe that if all news was consumed through aggregation services like Digg and Google News then it would be at the expense of people going straight to the main content creators…which would hurt their revenues…which would impact their ability to pay for the creation of the content. I could be wrong…just a theory. Interesting topic and thanks for commenting!
“…if all news was consumed through aggregation services like Digg and Google News…”
- This is the bit I think we disagree on. I don’t think that news is consumed through Google News or Digg…if you visit either of those sites you don’t consume the news there you only discover it. Invariably you have to click through to the orginating source. I suppose they effectively aggregate headlines from lots of places (and filter in the case of Digg) so I can quickly scan for things I’d like to read and then click through to them.
One area I would conceed is potentially iffy is Diggs commenting system…it is possible to argue that this steals audience and from content owners, though on the other hand lots of the content on Digg is just random pictures and stuff which doesn’t itself offer interaction from consumers.
“If I were a publisher I’d be nervous”
Irony of ironies you are a publisher! Which is a concept that “traditional” publishers fail to remember.