cdixon - Latest Comments in Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Mark Essel — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:24:26 -0000

Their continued innovation of the implementation of search was the killer app.

Look at the data warehouses they have created to consistently support massive web archiving and ordering. Pretty fascinating designs.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Mark Essel — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:23:24 -0000

Some interesting ideas Josh, I certainly liked the option to only allow comments for folks that buy in. But I'd like to ad, comments are as valuable to other readers (or moreso). Perhaps prioritize the showing of comments based on user crowd sourcing (votes) and large sorts by whether or not they support the media channel (special avatar, or they show up all together up top).

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Mark Essel — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:20:21 -0000

Great perspective, well defended and described assumptions and points-> on my 8th popular post (of the 13 you listed today) I score this one 8/10.

Capitalism absolutely depends on competition, hence our keen observation for potential abuse by monopolies.

There is little doubt in my mind that Google isn't approaching a search and information controlling monopoly in practice. He who gathers all the data owns it. They own our clicks/searches and click scoring.

Yes there is competition, but hands down they are the best and own search. I have used Bing, and others and have found them lacking. But even in the face of this powerful search monopoly real time search, and social search as evolved.

Perhaps monopolies can be bypassed in the space of the net, due to its very nature. User needs evolve, and that need drives innovation. Entrepreneurs feed off of that gap between need and availability. No one else is more empathetic to a users real needs than the relentless attention of startups. We'll fulfill what users most need because we won't even consider what they don't need. Big businesses have to deal with the cost of momentum shift within their large structures, and therefore roll onward unable to change course as fast emerging markets.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Bobby — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:38 -0000

Now I will delete my post from your listings if you don't pay me $5 :)

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

chris dixon — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:05:27 -0000

ha, i was thinking the same thing but didn't want to say so myself :)

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Bobby — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:41:02 -0000

This post looks awfully prescient in light of the last week's brouhaha about The Wall Street Journal and it's theoretical deal with Bing.

While you're not advocating it, you are the first (I've seen) to point out how search competition could be explicitly monetized by the newspapers.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

chris dixon — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:56:54 -0000

Interesting argument. Not sure I disagree. I was really just mainly trying to argue against that fallacy - or throw some actual microeconomics into the debate as you say.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Nico Flores — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:44:36 -0000

Good job for bringing a bit of microeconomics to this spat! But I'm not convinced that Google's strength would go away if it were smaller, or if it were replaced by others. Full version at http://ondemandmedia.typepa...

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

chris dixon — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:34:00 -0000

It would probably have to be business content like Lexis/Nexis.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

samfjacobs — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:26:49 -0000

What if the search itself wasn't free? Would people pay to use a search engine that had proprietary content associated with it?

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

chris dixon — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 11:14:45 -0000

I agree about pageload speed. That is huge and underappreciated.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

walterunderwood — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:37:49 -0000

I'm so tired of the PageRank myth. Every engine started using links and/or anchor text around the same time. Infoseek called it ESP, Inktomi called it LinkFlux, and so on. It made a huge difference in rejecting spam and a moderate difference in search quality. Infoseek continued to have search quality as good or better than Google.

Google won because their pages were fast and had no ads. They ran a search charity for a very long time. Their most important technology was putting ads on the page without losing their visitors, that is, inventing the text ad instead of the banner ad.

I was at Infoseek from 1997 until after they were bought by Disney, so I competed against Google back when it was beta.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

elstudio — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:08:13 -0000

True for the moment. But the number of papers (and, with AP, the amount of original content) could decline to the point that there are not too many newspaper suppliers. That's where Chris's argument gets interesting for me.

But there will still be competitors -- the blogs and politico.com's. And it's tough for me to see how newspapers will be cheap and agile enough to compete against these.

More about that in my response post: http://elstudio.us/post-the...

Thanks, Chris, for getting me thinking!

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

chris dixon — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:36:40 -0000

I agree actually. I think only certain parts of certain papers (the ones you mention) are non-commodotized. My argument was hypothetical to try to prove the point that just because a newspaper doesn't want to opt out doesn't mean a dominant search engine is good for you.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Name — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:21:21 -0000

You have the right intuitions, but one thing missing from your argument is that there are far more newspapers/news organizations than there are search providers (even under the hypothetical situation with 20 search engines). The bulk of news content today is commoditized -- I will gladly find more than 100 distinct articles on any major news item today, and sure enough the 100 will have more or less the same editorial content. Commoditization of news means that whether there are 2 or 20 search engines, each search provider will have no incentive to pay anything beyond commodity prices (in this case, zero) for news.

That said, certain sections of major publications (WSJ, NYT, WP) have original content that I would pay for (and even Google may pay for). In fact, I pay for my WSJ subscription because I do believe they have unique perspective and unique coverage that is far from commoditization today.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

chris dixon — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:43:41 -0000

Sure, they would definitely opt in. My point is that you have to opt in to Google because of their incredible dominance versus websites that "provide them content."

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

chris dixon — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:47:12 -0000

That's the New York Times's "last man standing" strategy. I think there is some validity too it. See http://www.nytimes.com/2009...

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

chris dixon — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:46:04 -0000

First let me say that my point was mainly academic. I was trying to refute a certain form of argument. I don't think anyone "should" pay Google anything. I have no dog in this fight and if I did take sides would probably take Google's.

Your comparison to the cable companies is a good one. Does the fact that I can get around cable companies, say via Hulu or piracy, change the basic bargaining dynamics? It's not whether you *can* go around - it's whether in practice people actually do. As long as the cable companies have 90% share, they are going to have bargaining power.

Your point about the search gap is interesting. If people use search engines to discover sites and then go back directly in large volume, that indeed would be a strong counterargument to my argument.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

doug — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:45:02 -0000

wsj doesn't seem to need Google to make a viable business. I think the arguments around a world with or without Google are specious. (The model of a world of partitioned crawling is just a bizarre creation that only makes sense as a way to prop up the rest of the argument that having a dominant search engine causes all sorts of problems.)

A dominant search engine does cause all sorts of problems if the only way to structure things is by making them free-with-ad-support because then you have a middle man as the only route to profit. In that world, the content providers make less money because they are put in direct competition with all of the other content providers... and, it turns out that the world is awash in content. The only one guaranteed to get good ad-traction is the middle man.

Most of these discussions involve tons of post-hoc reasoning where the free content and use of ads to subsidize our habits are kept constant. The audience prefers lots of great, free content, of course. And, as it turns out, the content providers prefer the juicy margins they used to make. Two poorly kept dirty little secrets...

I think both sides are going to end up needing to give some.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Srinagesh Eranki — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:52:56 -0000

Rather than crying foul, maybe newspapers should join together and get something akin to a search engine going. Where people can choose their locale & set their preferences.

A paper "customized" to each individual's needs .. I get to read writers I like in one place regardless of which publication they are currently affiliated with. Maybe rather than trying to protect their turf, they should concentrate on adding more value to their customers

Besides, this isn't the first time an industry has been in treat of losing control of the distribution ..

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Danny Sullivan — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:00:09 -0000

And oops, sorry for the extra bits below where I left off. Left over from when I started writing.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Danny Sullivan — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 14:59:19 -0000

We often struggle to understand the internet with "real world' metaphors, even when they might not be applicable. I think that's part of the issue with what you're suggesting.

Let me employ another real world model to explain. Cable or satellite television. Content owners will negotiate carry fees because of the various networks don't carry them, they don't get seen -- period. Channels in demand can get paid; those not in demand might have to pay.

You kind of suggest things should be like that for Google. That it will carry anyone for free, but if someone refuses, it doesn't care -- no one channel is big enough as a must include. So all the other content owners lose out, so to speak. They can't get paid their worth.

That's flawed. The fact remains that if you're not in Google, you still can be viewed, so to speak. If I want New York Times content, I can go there. Go on, take out Wikipedia. I know where to find it. I never search on Google for some things that I know I want from Amazon. I've learned where Amazon is, I go there.

This is something I once described as the "search gap." We know that something like 90 percent of people search on the web each day. But sites do not, on average, get 90% of their traffic from search engines. It tends to be around the 30% range. Why the gap? Because many people, once they've discovered a site, go directly back to it.

We've had a far more competitive situation with search engines in the past, say late 90s and early 2000s. Google wasn't so dominant then. And newspapers nor anyone was able to demand the carry fees you suggest. Actually, it was the opposite. It was far more widespread that search engines pushed the paid inclusion idea -- want to be in our results? You pay to make sure we get more than we might normally find.

Honestly, I don't see why newspapers or any content owner should get special treatment over others. Google for all its flaws is a fairly level playing field. Good content rises to the top. Let the papers participate in the same environment as the rest of us.

(I, for one, wouldn't miss Wikipedia).

While the buyer/supplier demands of the "real world" might be interesting, I don't think they apply here.

It suggest that each and every web site should be negotiating with Google for carry fees, as if Google is some type of cable network and that people can only get to the programming if Google carries it. Important channels can charge more, because the network knows its audience

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Apphacker — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 14:27:17 -0000

Maybe if someone built a better search engine, then they would lose market share. I don't really understand what your point is. Assume that Google switched to opt - in, in that it would only index your page if you explicitly opted in. What do you think the nytimes would do? Opt in.

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

mrshl — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:08:07 -0000

While I agree "there is nothing inherently un-monetizable about newspaper content." It doesn't follow that the money must come from Google (or another search engine). In the bizarro world you describe, where there are only 5 newspapers, those newspapers could probably charge their actual users for access.

It's not like people are just logging onto Google News to get their news. A sizeable number of people continue to navigate to their favorite news sites. In a world where there are fewer news sites, why wouldn't they be able to charge their users directly?

Re: Google and newspapers: the false choice of opting out

Marc — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:58:50 -0000

I agree with all this, but this sounds more like very good execution than invention.