Kenny Hemphill
Instead of blaming Google for lost ad revenue, newspaper publishers need to work out how to make the most of visitors to their websites.
Times are tough in the newspaper industry. As copy sales have plummeted, publishers, trying desperately to protect advertising revenue, have invested millions in online editions of their publications. The problem is, as many of them are discovering, that the Internet and print media are very different beasts when it comes to delivering results for advertisers.
Companies that were once happy to spend thousands of pounds on a single-page advert in a newspaper, in the hope it would translate to bigger revenues at some point in the future, now demand evidence of traffic and click-through rates so they can precisely target potential customers. Many of these businesses have discovered that smaller blogs and websites, providing in-depth expert content in niche markets, offer a better rate of return than huge news portals, which offer breadth but not a great deal of depth. The result is that newspaper publishers have failed to replace print advertising revenue with online advertising. It’s not that the money isn’t being spent, it’s just being spent elsewhere: on blogs, in search engine results pages, on YouTube and on Facebook.
The response from much of the newspaper industry hasn’t, however, been to soul search and try to work out how it can develop content that reaches the people that are currently being better served by social media, nor to develop innovative business models which can replace the lost advertising revenue with money from other sources. It has been to retreat and cry foul.
And the target of those cries, from organisations as diverse as News Corp and the Guardian Media Group (GMG), is Google. This might seem odd, given that the search giant is directly responsible for driving millions of visitors collectively to the websites of these publishing giants every month. More odd still, when you consider that visitors who arrive on a website via a link on a search engine results page have been shown in countless studies to be more likely to click on adverts, buy stuff, or sign up for marketing emails than those who arrive from other sources.
The beef with Google is focused not on its regular search pages, but on its news aggregator, Google News. That service, and others like it, claimed the GMG in a submission to the Digital Britain Report, mean the ‘current market dynamic between content creators and search engines/aggregators is skewed heavily in the latter’s favour. This is not conducive to a healthy environment for content creation in the online world’.
Google News presents, as results on searches, headlines from news sites, along with a short snippet from the first paragraph of the story, an image and a link to the story. You might think the traffic from those links would be compensation for the use of the content snippets. After all, were it not for the aggregator, visitors clicking on the link wouldn’t have found the story in the first place. The aggregator provides news sites with free additional traffic, from which they can only benefit.
Not so, claims the GMG. ‘There’s a vast over-supply in the market of advertising inventory, and yields have come under severe downward pressure. As a result, the value of the traffic generated by search engines and aggregators has reduced significantly.’ In other words, because the publishers can’t work out how to convert visitors into revenue, those visitors are worth less than the cost of attracting them. Except that there is no cost and those visitors wouldn’t exist were it not for the aggregators.
News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch is less diplomatic than the GMG: ‘The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them,’ he told Sky News Australia. And in a reference to the Fair Use doctrine, which enables Google to publish snippets, he threatened: ‘There’s a doctrine called fair use, which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether.’ That doctrine allows magazines like MacUser, as well as newspapers and websites like those owned by Murdoch, to publish, for example, screen grabs from software or quotes from books being reviewed. It’s crucial to the provision of information in all media and has been part of English Law since 1740.
While the responses to aggregators from the GMG and Murdoch may differ in tone, they are remarkably similar in spirit. They’re quite happy to get free traffic from aggregators and search engines – even Murdoch’s paid-for content in The Wall Street Journal can still be accessed for free from a search engine link.
They’re less happy that Google and others benefit from their content. Isn’t it about time that, rather than whinging, newspaper publishers started figuring out how to replace that lost advertising revenue with a business model that makes the most of all those free visitors rather than trying to use the law to make the web less useful to everyone?
