Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Broken Record

Just an update on what has quickly gone from a cold war to a very hot one. A week after The Guardian asked the UK to look into news aggregators use of other people's original content to drive revenues, Rupert Murdoch suggested that services like Google News should start paying for content. A couple of days later the AP said they'd "pursue legal and legislative actions" against aggregators who use member content without permission. Google's response? Quit whining and create a product readers want. With newspapers going belly up left and right this is going to come to a head very soon. Stay tuned.
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2 comments:

  1. UnknownApril 8, 2009 at 9:18 AM

    This battle will continue......

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  2. David HallApril 8, 2009 at 8:21 PM

    If offended by the occasional swear word, stop reading now.

    I read a little more detailed argument by Danny Sullivan (search engine technologist) on his blog about this same matter. It's a little wordy, but very entertaining because you can just feel the venom building up in him as he defends Google and blasts the newspapers.

    http://daggle.com/090406-225638.html

    My favorite section of the post:

    Perhaps all the papers should get together like Anthony Moor of the Dallas Morning News suggests in the same article:

    "I wish newspapers could act together to negotiate better terms with companies like Google. Better yet, what would happen if we all turned our sites off to search engines for a week? By creating scarcity, we might finally get fair value for the work we do."

    Please do this, Anthony. Please get all your newspaper colleagues to agree to a national "Just say no to Google" week. I beg you, please do it. Then I can see if these things I think will happen do happen:

    * Papers go "oh shit," we really get a lot of traffic from Google for free, and we actually do earn something off those page views

    * Papers go "oh shit," turns out people can find news from other sources

    * Papers go "oh shit," being out of Google didn't magically solve all our other problems overnight, but now we have no one else to blame.

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