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Comment by notjackma | Hacker News Reader

"As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable. "

Rubbish!

Google's Human Resources department doesn't make any money either, yet it exists, along with other loss-making divisions.

Google as a whole is a very profitable company, and it could easily pay publishers over the long run. It just doesn't want to.

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Just because you can afford to subsidize something doesn't mean you should. HR has a purpose inside Google, it has an output (payroll, disputes) fair to the input ($$$). Google News would take in $$$ and return nothing.

Yet they're already spending money on Google News: programmers, servers, electricity. So obviously they're getting something out of it, right? There is a purpose to Google News, whether it's tracking cookies or something else; they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Google has started all sorts of programs and then shut them down because they didn't turn out as hoped. I don't see why Google News losing money, and, say, becoming especially non-economical or burdensome to the company and being shut-down, would be any different.

I can't imagine Spain makes up a large majority of Google News's traffic.

If you think that HR department is a charity, then you do not really understand what HR department does. Try running a company without one, and see how much money you lose.

Try reading what I wrote again.

Google employs lots of people who work on things which do not directly generate revenue themselves, but which do contribute to the company's overall profit and loss. Such as HR.

However, based on Google's bitchy blog post, were they to treat all such projects and departments equally like Google News, thousands of people would be pink-slipped tomorrow. Get it now?

The difference is they do not lose any money if they stop running Google News Spain. They do if they stop running HR.

Actually they'll lose money if they keep running Google News Spain.

If it makes no financial sense to Google to run Google News Spain, why should they keep it running?

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