
Google: News sites may lose 45% of traffic if EU passes its Copyright Reform - howard941
https://thenextweb.com/eu/2019/02/07/google-copyright-reform-eu-article-11/
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Terretta
FTA:

 _Article 11 in its current form will limit news aggregators’ abilities to
show snippets of articles. According to Google‘s own experiments, the impact
of it only showing URLs, very short fragments of headlines, and no preview
images would be a “substantial traffic loss to news publishers.”_

 _“Even a moderate version of the experiment (where we showed the publication
title, URL, and video thumbnails) led to a 45 percent reduction in traffic to
news publishers,” Walker explained. “Our experiment demonstrated that many
users turned instead to non-news sites, social media platforms, and online
video sites — another unintended consequence of legislation that aims to
support high-quality journalism.”_

This holds true if and only if the user is starting at Google, where its
market share + ads + SEO gave rise to content mills. It’s 45% reduction in
“start at Google, click an SEO’d result link.”

Once upon a time, people bookmarked sites with high-quality content, and would
go directly there.

Google’s experiment assumes the user starts with Google, and doesn’t account
for users going directly to a smaller number of higher quality sites, which
can then do the NYTimes approach of first party ads and high quality audience
to achieve higher revenue.

Sounds like the legislation could have precisely the desired effect.

~~~
thebradbain
> Once upon a time, people bookmarked sites with high-quality content, and
> would go directly there.

Anecdotally, as a late-millennial close to the Gen Z cutoff, I cannot tell you
the last time I or my peers have bookmarked a site. Older relatives have said
their children in highschool who are part of an otherwise probably(?) the most
technically proficient generation don't even know what bookmarking is (another
fun experiment: ask anyone in Gen Z what the www. before a website domain
stands for, you'll be surprised by some answers).

I personally can't see myself or others who previously didn't habitually
bookmark starting to bookmark sites en masse just because Google has to change
their algorithms; that's like saying people will go back to MySpace because
Facebook has so many privacy scandals around it.

~~~
Terretta
I agree with you.

I wrote about this 9 years ago (2010) when ReadWriteWeb noticed people were
getting to Facebook by typing Facebook into Google. _So_ many, that when
ReadWriteWeb outranked Facebook for the term ‘facebook’, masses ended up on
their article, and started complaining in the comments it wasn’t Facebook:

 _A decade ago, I switched to Google because it offered me a search box that
led to nothing but results. That 's all I wanted, and all it did. This match
made in heaven catapulted Google ahead of Excite, Lycos, Altavista, and
Inktomi._

 _While the search box has stayed the same, Google 's users have not. Today's
Googlers don't know the difference between a URL and a search term, or even
between a browser and the Internet._

 _By focusing on features such as real time web search or categorized results
for tech-savvy users, Google is stranding its mass audience – a mistake its
advertising business model absolutely cannot afford. Google needs to cater to
the folks who ended up on ReadWriteWeb through their typical use path, making
Google work for them and get them where they 're trying to go, instead of
trying to retrain them to adapt to Google._

 _Google needs to refine the "I feel lucky" button until it's good enough to
be the default, helping the Internet's least savvy users find where they want
to be even if they're doing it wrong._

AOL was doing this before the turn of the millennium, so it’s not just you and
your “late-millennials” friends, it’s also your grandparents.

Before the bookmark, you could type a single keyword in, and go directly
there. BnL, these amount to the single word of a domain name. Last few years,
browsers are gradually bringing back the keyword, even toying with URL bar to
drop “www”, “.com”, and the path. So I agree with you, it’s not really about
bookmarks.

Surely we can imagine another way of going directly to a trusted brand than
the extra clicks needed at a “search engine” or “portal”.

For instance, Page Rank itself used to just be a meta view of which sites were
most linked to as a proxy for most authoritative, meaning, the audience that
followed references or links would organically find the most cited or linked
sources, and then know to get back there by name or by bookmark.

The point is, high quality “destination” brands can benefit from fans reaching
them directly, without having to play the SEO and SERPs traffic funnel game.

