Goggled by Google
By John Burke Posted Jul 1 2007
For centuries, those with power controlled the flow of information through expensive means, be it the printing press or television and radio frequencies. In this way, traditional media took on a powerful gatekeeping role. Not only did they control information, but they also made fortunes selling it to audiences and advertisers.
Now, virtually all content is available to the masses, and the most popular way to find it is through Google. Users are able to find the content they want when they want it, circumventing restrictive newspapers and broadcasters and sometimes disregarding established copyright laws. They consume it, manipulate it, share it and make it their own. More often then not, they do this without paying, which has sent shivers down the spines of traditional media companies.
The fall of the information dictators
The World Wide Web is just that: anyone in Tucson, Ariz., can read the latest news about Timbuktu from a publisher in Thailand. Before the Internet, newspapers, radio and television news in Tucson might have given the briefest mention of Timbuktu, and a Thai paper would certainly not have been available in any convenient store in Arizona. The gatekeeper publishers in town controlled access to information for the city’s population.
Online, those gatekeepers lose their traditional roles and are essentially in competition with their equivalents around the world.
This plethora of easily attainable news information from thousands of sources, however, needs a method of organization, like the Dewey Decimal System in your local library.
That’s where search engines come in. They make it incredibly simple for anyone to find anything. News aggregators, such as Google and Yahoo, have taken this a step further by dedicating an entire search engine to news content.
Google has perfected the practice of the search more than others, which is why the site remains the world’s most popular search engine, a distinction that allows it to branch out into many other areas.
It has been said that if you are not on Google, you don’t exist. If you can’t be found through the Mountainview, Calif.-based behemoth’s core product, you won’t survive in the digital age.
This adage is not far-fetched; Google claims well over half of the world’s search market. Moreover, online marketing is becoming ever more important if not obligatory, and Internet penetration is only spreading. As a result, entrenched business models and economics are being upturned. But some traditional news publishers have tried to cling to the status quo.
For content providers, the role as gatekeeper is two-fold. It implies a control of editorial decisions made by newsroom executives to fit their material into the pages of their newspapers and the timeslots of their television and radio programs. Second, publishers influence the editorial gatekeepers in that the content they choose to publish must be appealing to the public in order to hold on to eyeballs and keep advertisers happy.
Yet, take a look at what happens when traditional publishers attempt to maintain their gatekeeping role by erecting barriers to their online content in the age of Google and ubiquitous information.
In September 2006, The New York Times launched TimesSelect, a service based on a traditional subscription model that placed selected content and most of the paper’s well-known columnists behind a paywall. The most significant result of this paywall is that it has effectively shut out The Times’ once very influential op-ed columnists from the online conversation. Whereas the revered journalists once initiated discussion, many bloggers refused to pay for their content, figuring it was just as easy to find quality commentary elsewhere and stopped linking to their articles.
In another example driven by the continued desire to control content as well as monetary anxieties, the Spanish-speaking world’s most popular quality newspaper, Spain’s El Pais, launched its website as subscription only. Spanish speaking readers quickly found that they could find the same information for free at El Mundo, El Pais’ main rival. Although El Pais freed up its site in May 2005, El Mundo remains by far Spain’s most popular news Web site and also claims a large audience in Latin America, a distinction that El Pais would probably hold if it had left its articles open for consultation.
The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, probably boasts the media industry’s only example of a successful subscription service. If counted as newspaper circulation, the number of subscribers to wsj.com would make it the fifth largest newspaper in America. But even The Wall Street Journal has gradually been freeing up more content, especially content dealing with the Internet business. The financial daily realized that these are the types of articles that create buzz in the blogosphere and can drive traffic back to the paper’s site.
The contentious issue of copyright
The flip side of the gatekeeper coin is copyright concerns. Publishers use intellectual property laws to keep their material from being published by others and to maintain proprietary and monetary control of content. In the United States, copyright rules can be loosened by a “fair use” clause, which Google and other search engines have used to justify their listing of traditional publishers content when searched for on their news aggregators.
Google News’ spiders automatically scan 4,500 sources from around the world every 15 minutes for updates. Publishers are free to request that their publication not be scanned. Those not listed can submit a request to be added to the catalog, at which time people behind the scenes at Google determine whether the content of the requesting site will add value to its search results. According to “Trends in the Newsroom 2007,” up to 25 percent of traffic to news sites comes through search engines.
Some publishers, concerned that they no longer totally control access to their own content, began accusing the likes of Google of stealing content and building a business model on their backs, an argument based on conventional copyright laws.
An association representing the copyright interests of Belgian publishers, Copiepresse, sued Google in September 2006 and demanded that the company remunerate them to “use” their copyrighted content. Copiepresse General Secretary Margaret Boribon says: “We are asking for Google to pay and seek our authorization to use our content.” In March 2007, Google lost its final appeal in Belgium and was forced to remove the publications represented by Copiepresse from its searches.
In winter 2005, Agence France-Presse sued Google for $17.5 million, declaring that the search engine was using its copyrighted content without permission. Google tried to take AFP content off its search engine but it proved difficult: AFP is a news agency whose content is published in various publications throughout the world, many of which use that content online.
The copyright association also went after MSN and Yahoo for the same reasons, both of which complied with the company’s wishes. Rough estimates are that the represented publications immediately lost 15 percent of their Web traffic.
The Norwegian version of Google News was forced to stop publishing copyrighted images in December 2006 after repeated attacks by the Norwegian Media Businesses’ Association (MBL). The Norwegian version had been put under pressure by the MBL since its launch on Nov.16th. Google News Norway can now only display images coming from non-MBL news sites – almost none since most Norwegian sources are MBL members.
In response to the Belgian case, the British daily The Guardian wrote, “Similar cases in Germany and the Netherlands not involving Google have found in favor of Internet sites linking to copyrighted content. … The Belgian ruling seems very unusual and unprecedented. The scope and breadth of the ruling, on a very narrow foundation, is also extraordinary. If courts start preventing linking, we’re entering a slippery slope.”
Old giants yield to new giants
Amidst all the ruckus, it appeared that Google and other search engines were going to emerge from these suits unscathed, especially because in 2006, they started striking deals with traditional publishers.
In July 2006, the AP and Google announced their organizations would begin cooperating. Details were scarce and remain so. Some hypothesized that Google would help the AP create its own news portal, an assumption that the AP flatly rejected. Others think it will be a revenue sharing deal, adding an additional stream to the AP’s coffers. Various other publishers have also approached Google, and similar deals are reportedly being worked out.
The AFP suit dragged on for two years, finally resulting in an agreement in April 2007. Few details were divulged and speculation ranged from revenue sharing to AFP giving in, realizing that Google’s fair-use claims hold and that the search engine ultimately drives traffic to AFP content.
It seemed that search engines and traditional publishers recognized the mutual benefit they could provide for one another.
Then Google bought YouTube.
In March 2007, media giant Viacom sued YouTube for $1 billion, declaring it was stealing revenue from the company by allowing users to upload clips of its copyrighted content. Media watchers expected a case like this from the beginning, seeing that the social video site is chock full of material from traditional publishers.
Google expected it too; at the time of purchase (Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube, which brought in a mere $15 million in 2006), it reserved $200 million solely for legal problems.
Business Week reported that Google tried to reach agreements with several Hollywood powerhouses but that talks deteriorated because Google’s offers continued to shrink, and it refused to develop algorithms to shut out copyrighted content from YouTube.
Other established broadcasters took a different approach. For instance, broadcaster CBS fed 300 clips of some of its programs to YouTube that were viewed by 30 million people. Ultimately, in November 2006, CBS attributed a 5 percent jump in viewers to these programs as originating with the YouTube promotion.
Partially for these reasons, Forbes figured that the Viacom suit was just a smokescreen, a precursor to more serious negotiations and revenue sharing deals between old and new media. It was assumed that the $1 billion was a symbolic sum and that the legal costs would far outweigh any benefit for Viacom, which most analysts figured didn’t have much of a chance of winning anyway. AOL’s bloggingstocks.com quoted Mark Sigal, CEO of online video site vSocial: “The last thing that Viacom wants to be seen as doing is poking their audience in the eye by suing the sites consumers have chosen as their preferred destinations to upload their favorite clips.”
Viacom’s various holdings have sites of their own. For example, Comedy Central, where clips of The Daily Show and South Park are streamed. Undoubtedly, Viacom recognizes that clips of their programs found on YouTube will eventually drive traffic back to its own site where users will view its advertising. For this, chances are, the Viacom/YouTube suit will never see a day in court. The traditional media giant is simply peeved that it makes no money from users uploading clips to YouTube.
It is obvious that media consumption and economics are being radically transformed on the Web. Viacom and other traditional publishers will not be able to stop this sea change. Some analysts say that traditional media had the chance to develop Googles of their own and that with a little investment and innovation, they could have shaped the Web in their own manner. But ingrained business practices and monstrous profit margins shielded their senses from the digital storm brewing on the horizon.
Now they must admit that they have been bested by new media start-ups and move on. As time passes, more traditional publishers will negotiate with new media companies and others will yield to the fact that online players contribute exponentially to their own online offerings. Google will continue to grow, and more deals will be signed. Having learned from their mistakes, established content providers will be constantly on the lookout for the latest online technologies, experimenting with them to find new audiences and new streams of revenues. Maybe one day it will be a conventional media company that finds a jewel in the digital rough, the next Google perhaps. And just like that, the dynamic of the Internet could change, returning the role of the gatekeeper to those who once were.