Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

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> News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault.

To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play.

> make sure the fund is actually funding journalism

I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me.

Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial process?

The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast have traditionally had very strong commission based internal sales operations. They have the people to go out, get advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or retarget this staff for the new market place.

Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.

> How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me.

nobody other than the publishers is trying to say the money should be based on view counts. tying anything to view counts is obviously a dumb idea.

> To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play.

This outright BS. Noone asked them to fill their sites with popup videos, popup ads, spam and other garbage.

Noone asked them to spam people with notifications in iOS either and Google didn't force them to do that either.

Stop blaming Google for the deep rot within the news industry, they did it to themselves.

Sure they did. They created page and site metrics that then tied to search engine placement. All the "garbage" is an effort to improve their "performance" within these specific metric categories. It's the same story with "AMP." Publishers had zero incentive to create AMP versions of their site, but they did anyways, because they saw that they lost placement if they didn't comply.

I'm not "blaming" Google, nor should you be "defending" them. What I'm attempting to do here is show that they definitely, perhaps indirectly, played a significant part in the shape of the modern web. While simultaneously decrying the laziness of publishers that led them to this late stage outcome.

I mean.. did you want to discuss how things might improve, or did you just want to score points?

AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers.

You're crafting a false narrative of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave by someone else, when that is not even remotely true. They've been cost cutting and compromising themselves way before some evil tech corporation came to them.

There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.

> AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers.

That was very generous of the billion dollar corporation to do. I'm sure there was no self serving motivation behind it.

> of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave

You seem to be struggling to see this outside of a black and white narrative and are mistaking your own polemic as being diametrically opposed to my point of view.

> There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.

You also seem to be unaware of just how many small and medium sized broadcasters and publishers there are or how large this industry actually is. You are interested in narratives, I'm interested in facts. I don't think there's much more to discuss between us.

AMP was great. All the anti-AMP (and signed web bundles) advocacy was profoundly user-hostile

If AMP had stuck around, we wouldn't have the quagmire of terrible UX on news sites today. The hostility towards AMP was wholly undeserved.

It was absolutely, 100% deserved.

It was definitely not. AMP was mostly a standard for how you should build performant websites. Then you could opt into what was effectively google caching and serving your AMP-enabled webpages for you. This is good actually.

No, AMP was a way for Google to increase their ad revenue and try to prevent people from leaving Google.

Google is DEEPLY and directly involved in the ecosystems that:

* pay publishers more for showing video ads than showing text or image ads

* encourages and creates invasive tracking Javascript and cookies-and-similar tricks

* rewards SEO/spam tricks with higher placements in search

Remember when google first launched and it was so great as it was just some text adverts rather than things like punch the monkey.

I remember when google first launched and didn't have ads because the founders wrote a whitepaper about how ads would inevitably ruin google

Advertisers have wanted moving ads since the dawn of the internet, and I'd be shocked if they weren't always willing to pay more to get them. But the big selling point of Google, and one of the drivers that got them to where they are today, is they looked at that money and said "no, it isn't worth it, this will compromise the user experience". Then they went with text ads on Google search.

Over the years I assume they've changed that decision along with the general cultural rot that comes to large companies, but there is a clear precedent. Publishers didn't have to take money to make their own product worse. They could have made their product good and tried to make money that way.

Although realistically these media companies are probably going to go out of business with the current model whatever they try. The internet has made a mockery of their credibility; the future seems to be podcasters with dedicated audiences going it alone or blogs - the costs are lower and the quality is generally higher.

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