Wanting to force someone to advertise your product and charge him for it sounds so backwards, especially from a right-wing company. I'm happy this terrible excuse for a publisher couldn't get through with it. Will be interesting to see the Bild headlines about it, at the moment they are still busy rallying against unions (e.g. by printing the phone numbers of union leaders).
I've been following this Leistungsschutzrecht development for a long time now and I still can't believe how ridiculous it is or that the law actual passed.
Now, after taking a step back, failing to force Google to pay for providing a service that is much more beneficial to Springer than it is to Google, Bild and Springer try to paint a picture that displays them as the victims in this issue, being bullied by big old Google. It gets more absurd by the day.
Also, this right only applies to Google - if you're DuckDuckGo or any other search engine you're still not allowed to show snippets from Springer media. So they are complaining about Google's market dominating position by strengthening it? Utterly absurd.
Springer and especially Bild are famous for hounding everybody who is not nice to them. Lets see what they do with Google now :o).
Will be fun to watch Google presenting those headlines in the search results.
And I agree, it is a ridiculous fight and Springer is more to blame than Google in this case. But, that's what happens in saturated markets. Its business.
You’re forgetting Google is a global company. If they get a specific tax on content their simply going to drop the market to avoid such taxes spreading. They might even simply decide to avoid doing business in Germany entirely. Net result a worse compeditor shows up discuraging users and Bild loses even more money.
Since Google et al will always get exceptions from publishers, the Leistungsschutzrecht will primarily hurt small companies and start-ups through its newly embedded legal uncertainty.
The best thing about their press release[0] is that within a couple of sentences they a) complain that they'd lose seven-digits in advertising a year per brand over the short listing on Google news and resulting decrease in traffic, b) demand that Google pays them for the Google news interaction.
Maybe they will take this to the Federal Cartel Office now: "See, Google has such a large impact on our revenue, they are a monopoly." Of course the "Leistungsschutzrecht" has been ridiculous from the start but it might help them to prove their point to take it further.
Because google could exist without their content to index...
On one hand they whine about Google's power and on the other they want the benefits too? Might as well complain about the enormous power of gravity over us and legislate it away.
Google should just cut the hosepipe, and let's see what happens. Though that's wishful thinking as it would be a political move bound to end up leaving a mess everywhere
Doepfner said the resulting dramatic drop in traffic to his company's publications was proof of Google's overwhelming power in the search market. He said he hoped lawmakers, courts and competition regulators would take action to curb its powers.
"Others will have to pick up the ball now," the Springer boss told reporters on a conference call following the publication of the Berlin-based company's quarterly results.
So indeed it sounds like that's exactly what they are saying.
The question is, how much does Google make, a year, from its news aggregator pages?
I bet it is more than Bild does.
If nobody allowed Google to do the snippets, Google's news business would sink. But since they cannot pass the copyright law for the entire world, Google's business is less affected by the ban. Because it is a monopoly.
I see it from a different angle. Google has invested in creating both Google News, and search in general. Yes, Google's business would sink if nobody allowed it to do snippets, but it's also not in their interest to do that.
Let's go to extremes and say that everyone the world over blocks Google from indexing and aggregating their news sites. That means that smaller players can enter the market, but if the blocking is based on principle; then those smaller players would have to invest in infrastructure, IP, and still have to pay publishers! Then publishers then also lose out.
From reading the article, it seems like the company is saying we're shooting ourselves in the foot by blocking Google, yet we still want to piss in our revenue fountain.
Google doesn't have ads on the news subdomain. They only make money indirectly by driving traffic to publishers who are Doubleclick customers and adding new behavioral data to the profiles of logged in users.
I think the point here is being missed a bit. Yes they get a lot of benefit from traffic coming from Google. The point is they want that traffic coming directly to them.
If people go to Google News they see traffic from other alternative news sources as well. These people are Google News users and sometimes see e.g. Die Welt content, but Die Welt wants them to be Die Welt users. The publishers are used to having a direct relationship with their readers, they don't want to be competing with news clips and links from budget internet news sites and blog aggregators.
What's most interesting is that they have their own Facebook pages. So these guys are choosing to use Facebook for free to promote their brand, with pictures and excerpts from their articles. The thing there is that a relationship through Facebook can be more direct. The Facebook page is really an extension of the Die Welt web site, bringing it closer to Facebook users and trying to built that relationship. There's no way to do that through Google News.
Now, I do agree they're going about their relationship with Google in a bone headed and self-harming way. However they are doing it for what appear to them to be valid reasons. That's why papers and magazines always preferred direct subscriptions to sales on news stands. If they could have locked news stands into exclusive relationships, they would have.
So I think we can expect to see more initiatives like this from these publishers. Right now they're flailing around blindly and making fools of themselves, but they are not going to give up on their actual goals and eventually are likely to get smart about it. It'll be interesting to see what that looks like, but I doubt any effective initiatives they may come up with will be to the benefit of news consumers.
> The point is they want that traffic coming directly to them.
Very insightful and true. The problem is that they can't find a strategy to make this happen and are capitulating due to their lack of ability.
That is to say, _if_ they could find a way to make aggregator customers instead into their customers, they wouldn't be backing down. What they're discovering, however, is that, even if they weaken Google, they don't strengthen themselves in the process. Readers simply turn to other sources.
This implies that readers perhaps don't value Axel Springer's content over other news sources. Or, at least, they don't value it over the value of aggregators.
This is not about customer-middleman-publisher relationships, but the publishers wanting Google to advertise their crap and pay them for it, based on the false claim that the excerpts in the advertisement have copyrightable value; they don't.
