
A new licensing program to support the news industry - caution
https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/licensing-program-support-news-industry-/
======
tannhaeuser
> _... these events are happening at a time when the news industry is also
> being challenged financially_

Yeah, and what's challenging to the "news industry" is the monopolistic
situation on the web and the utter lack of action on the part of US antitrust
authorities and their allies. I find it very worrying that _Der Spiegel_ ,
once the most frequently visited ad-supported news sites in the "old" German
web, sees no other hope than partnering with Google. Sorry if I'm being too
harsh, but the problem can't be solved by Google, when the problem _is_
Google. _Der Spiegel_ once more showing they completely outsold their
journalistic punch and demonstrating basic media incompetence (which is the
very last thing you want a credible publisher to do).

~~~
quantummkv
Actions like these start making a lot of sense if you start viewing Google and
their friends as a bunch of hi-tech mafioso. Newspapers are essentially forced
to pay protection money and then publicly kiss the ring, declare their
allegiance and pray that the deal is not altered further.

~~~
wbl
Google doesn't compete with papers but link papers to readers.

~~~
tannhaeuser
GOOG, FB, and AMZN extract all value out of the web, the music industry,
retail, IT/cloud, soon e-learning, and basically everything, with content
creators getting nothing. In music, we've already seen the effect of no
monetary feedback for too many years now; save for very few counterexamples,
we haven't seen any innovation since the 1990's; instead we have raised a
generation of YouTube addicts. _That_ is the problem to solve sooner rather
than later; it doesn't matter how and why we got here, and it's not a question
of whether Google or someone else did anything wrong. It's about how we can go
on in a civil society with large public investments into eg IP networking, law
enforcement, etc. to only line the pockets of very very few.

~~~
chrisseaton
What’s wrong with YouTube? I frequently find far better content there than
anywhere in the traditional media. I think we’re really lucky to have YouTube
- it’s one little ray of hope.

~~~
LockAndLol
YouTube is the biggest site for music copyright infringement. Not even the
pirate could've dreamed of such a massive music distribution network that
doesn't remunerate artists.

YouTube is also a monopoly that wields its power with impunity. Content
creators can be in business one day and out of it the next. Large corporations
can claim nearly anything theirs and Google won't do anything about it while
smaller content creators can see their IP infringed upon by the former and
have no recourse.

~~~
chrisseaton
> that doesn't remunerate artists

I think if you use copyright music YouTube detects that’s automatically and
gives them the ad revenue? That’s what the Vevo agreement was.

~~~
LockAndLol
It remunerates labels and copyright trolls way more than it does artists. It's
also been known to incorrectly identify sources of copyright infringement and
unjustly take away ad revenue. I long stopped following it, but I imagine
there's a subreddit called /r/youtubedrama (or the like) that documents that
quite well.

------
doublesCs
Just to get a sense for the crowd: am I the only one who doesn't care much
about the news industry?

Keeping with what's new in society is important insofar as having an informed
population is vital for the correct functioning of a democracy. But the "news
industry" is 95% gargabe and contributes zero to getting people informed. I
firmly believe that if the news industry disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn't be
much worse off as a society.

That google is a bad player should be dealt with on its own. We shouldn't be
using the "news industry" as a justification for breaking google up.

EDIT: In fact I had never thought about it, but even as far as keeping people
informed, google is better than the "news industry". At least with google I
can find links which I use as starting points for reasearching something.

~~~
syshum
I care about NEWS, factual reporting on current event

We no longer have a news industry, we have a propaganda industry filled with
political commenters and activists not journalists (that is both left and
right)

~~~
Jon_Lowtek
facts don't matter, stories sell

~~~
tumetab1
I would phrase it like but I agree with the conclusion.

> Facts matter but stories sell.

------
ngold
No one forced all news organizations to dump their in house advertising for
easily ad blocked versions.

They all had perfectly good reasons to not have to deal with the headache of
losing money.

But that would require keeping the ad sales team they had on board and making
a similiar product online.

But everyone got scared and lazy and saw a one quarter jump by dumping a bunch
of staff.

~~~
ketzu
Did the prices for ads not dramatically drop over time?

To me, it feels like it was just market forces driving those decisions. They
could have kept the ad sales team and fewer ads, but that doesn't mean that
would have worked out.

~~~
user5994461
Don't think so. Ads should be a good dollar per thousand views. Maybe 3 dollar
for videos. Well known newspaper may be able to get more given their
reputation and how many ads they plaster per page.

I think it's the economy of scale that's difficult to achieve. An employee has
to bring in thousands of dollar just to pay for own salary, that's millions of
views per month. The costs and revenues don't add up to sustain a large
company and it has to spam (low quality) content to survive.

------
alkonaut
If google actually creates a good system for paying news media through e.g.
microtransactions or group subscriptions which is ONLY there to improve the
internet and doesn't benefit google (Get more traffic, get more user data,
...) then this is a good thing. It would be like the google/apple teaming up
on the BT proximity tracking apis in android and iOS.

If google gets any cut in such a system, or even gets a slight benefit, or
even knows who has what subscriptions and uses that information - then I'm
completely against it. But if they spend their own money developing platforms
that they then have _no control over and no benefit from_ \- good! Otherwise -
bad!

~~~
SyneRyder
_> If google actually creates a good system for paying news media through e.g.
microtransactions..._

They had something close to this with Google Contributor:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor)

You add a few dollars to your online account, nominate which participating
sites you want it to work with, and you would get an ad-free / paywall-free
experience on those sites. The sites would determine the price per page - some
only charged 1c, while some smaller blogs charged 5c. Some large Australian
newspapers signed up, and apparently Mashable and The Onion were part of it at
launch.

Ultimately every website I followed pulled out of the program. It seems that
advertising revenue earns more for newspapers than anyone is prepared to pay
for news. I never even used up the $5 I put into my Google Contributor
account.

~~~
andrepd
Isn't that the idea of Flattr?

~~~
SyneRyder
Pretty much, except I don't think Flattr allowed content creators to set their
own price & put stuff behind a paywall. Flattr is more of a donation / Patreon
model. Contributor instead set an upfront price on accessing each article.

(I could be wrong, it's years since I last used Flattr. I'm surprised but glad
to see they're still around.)

------
Mirioron
Will these news publishers also get "demonetized" when they report on
something Google doesn't like? I'm not sure I like Google having this much
power over (smaller) news organizations.

~~~
syshum
Google would never politically bias their service /s

------
adamjb
>To start, we have signed partnerships with local and national publications in
Germany, Australia and Brazil

Australia was/is gearing up to force Google to pay. Was anything similar
brewing in Germany or Brazil?

[https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/making-facebook-
and-...](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/making-facebook-and-google-
pay-for-australian-news-is-a-wake-up-call-20200419-p54l7s.html)

~~~
zeeZ
Yes, Leistungsschutzrecht (ancillary copyright for press publishers).

They tried to force Google (and others) to pay, but instead of paying, Google
asked "give us permission to use your content or we'll have to delist you",
and many obliged, while other aggregators suffered.

I believe in Spain Google News just outright shut down.

------
habosa
Anyone remember Google Contributor?
[https://contributor.google.com/v/beta](https://contributor.google.com/v/beta)

------
lvs
Google News has degraded so much in the last few years that it's essentially
useless. The combination of their updated material design (or whatever they're
calling it) and AMP was a one-two punch. Click through to related articles is
always wrong -- none of the articles are related, and there are many dozens
more related that don't show. It's just a dead service.

------
bregma
At first I thought this was about some central licensing body regulating and
awarding credentials to journalists, just like is done in professional
endeavours like medicine, engineering, and law. I was internally debating the
merits vs. the dangers (self-regulated or government controlled? Do we want
official state-approved press?).

Then I realized that it was purely about a distributor musing about paying
content providers in the hopes they can influence it, at least ostensibly for
"quality".

I see nothing wrong with the idea. Money is our way of measuring value, and
information certainly has value and Google has been making mint extracting the
excess value from information for a long time, to the point that little
actually leaks through to the end consumer.

I thinks this move would increase the quality of news, but the consumer needs
to understand that the product they are consuming is influenced by the media
through which they consume it. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, as they
say.

~~~
52-6F-62
I cautiously applaud Google's reparation payments (that's how I'm reading
these initiatives), but I'm very wary of the fact that Google is calling this
next stage a licensing.

They didn't really go into details. Are we going to see "Google Licensed" news
agencies now? That does not sit well with me.

------
raverbashing
It seems Google is feeling a hot breath in the back of the neck since news and
publishing orgs were lobbying for draconian interpretations/implementations of
the Copyright Directive (which probably would be judicially questionable,
still)

------
mtgx
I know this is still a very rough idea, but I truly believe the future of
content monetization is having some kind of decentralized or even federated
payment system and digital wallet that's provider-agnostic and allows people
to do "micro-donations", whether it's through upvotes, claps, time spent on
the page, or a combination of all of those and more.

If this depends on Google, or Paypal, or Apple, and you can only donate to a
site if you have PayPal, or if you have Google Pay, or whatever, it will never
reach its true potential.

It should be kind of like email, where everyone has email. Once everyone has
an "email-like" digital wallet, and all of these websites accept "email-like
money" through micro-donations, I think content monetization would work much
better.

~~~
searchableguy
[https://webmonetization.org/](https://webmonetization.org/)

------
sleepysysadmin
Eons ago when Google started aggregating news they greatly damaged the news
industry. This is because you could start seeing the bigger story and the bias
in the individual reporting. This was damaging to Fox News obviously.

It got worse unfortunately, the journalists were caught faking scenes.
[https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-
live-s...](https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-
shot/index.html?sr=twCNN110416abc-news-stage-live-
shot0715PMStoryLink&linkId=30720260)

Then the fake news was discovered:
[https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg)

Same newspaper, same story, contradictory reporting. Obviously this was done
for different places.

People started discovering that news is heavily fake. Why buy something when
they are outright lying to you? This is the reason the news industry is dying.

~~~
8organicbits
> Then the fake news was discovered:
> [https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg)

> Same newspaper, same story, contradictory reporting. Obviously this was done
> for different places.

I believe you are misinformed. A couple searches on the headlines tells a
different story.

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wsj-different-trump-
headli...](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wsj-different-trump-headlines/)

> Yes, the images represent two different editions, published at different
> times, and the headlines represent the news at the time of publication —
> before and after his speech.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wall-street-
jou...](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wall-street-journal-
headlin-idUSKBN23V22J)

> While the two covers are both authentic, they were published at different
> times on that day to reflect evolving developments.

