Hacker News Reader

Comment by eastendguy | Hacker News Reader

Subsidizing? I would call it stop freeloading... Quality news has a cost.

>Quality news has a cost

Have you seen what Murdoch-owned media publish these days? It's biased clickbait and gossip, there is nothing quality about News Corp content. Look at the front-page of news.com.au and you'll see what alleged News Corp quality news looks like.

There are much better news sources out there not crying about Google (and writing quality investigative journalism) like; crikey.com.au, abc.net.au, theguardian.com.au, theconversation.com/au, independentaustralia.net, michaelwest.com.au.

How is it freeloading? I don’t understand this point of view, but I want to understand your perspective.

Reporter A spends 50 hours researching and writing about a topic. She publishes it on her own blog.

Now I scrape this text (as summary) and display it on my own "Latest news" blog and the original author does often not even get a click-through. I do not think that is fair towards the original author.

If the reporter lives from ads on her blog then she needs traffic, because more traffic is more income.

So bringig traffic to the blog is a big value, so she should pay for this service. But she doesn't, because search engines are free.

News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic.

>News sites can block google and other bots any time on their sites with robots.txt, but they don't because they want the traffic for free, while they even demand money from those who bring the traffic.

I was feeling different about this topic until you brought this up. I think this is a really good argument. Yes, google scrapes and gets value from what they scrape without paying, however you can block this as a publisher if you don't want this.

The problem these attempts try to adress is that it's not a real choice: doing that would likely end your business, while boycotting would have little effect on google/Facebook. So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power.

> So it's a power struggle where one side doesn't really have a choice, because the other side has all the power.

You do have a choice though. You can choose not to use google ads and stop performing SEO and drive business in alternative ways. Further, there are more search engines than just google. If your business model depends on google it may be time to rethink that strategy. Any competent marketing strategy would rely on diversified channels anyway.

The search engines also receive value in being an index or directory that people can use to lookup articles. The situation here is somewhat unique because Google is in a position to reap all of the benefit from this relationship by just scraping the content and displaying it directly to the user.

A comparable scenario would be something like the phone book or yelp where these directories have value to users but they simply refer users to the businesses advertising in the directory.

Same reporter "borrows" a photo/video editorially and doesn't pay the creator[0][1].

[0]: http://gakuran.com/daily-mail-used-my-photos-without-permiss... [1]: https://expertphotography.com/the-daily-mail-stole-my-photos... (Note this guy eventually got paid by chasing)

That would be copyright infringement and is already illegal. Not the topic of discussion.

Isn't that pretty much all news works? After all, investigations are a rarity, and most stories in media outlets are basically sourced/paraphrased from elsewhere. If one site/network/paper finds something interesting like this, you bet anything that every other outlet will have their own story on the subject online in the next few minutes.

To some degree it's also how aggregator sites like Reddit and Hacker News work. Maybe even with anti paywall methods, archivers, etc getting the story in plain text format.

It seem blatent copyright infringement to me.

The law prevents Google from removing their results. Ie the news companies are freeloading from Google.

Does it prevent it from stop indexing these sites? Imagine it does display "latest news" snippets, but from 3 months ago...

Google is a de-facto monopoly for search.

Use bing or duckduckgo, which you can find via Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=search+engines+that+are+not+...

Exercise your consumer choice.

Until enough people do that, Google still has 90%+ of the general search traffic. De facto monopoly.

Being the superior product while numerous alternatives exist that perform similarly is not a monopoly.

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