"Google Devalues Everything It Touches" - Wall Street Journal Chief

Who says Google is always going to be the front window to all information...or any of the other names in the search environment either? I currently use iGoogle to amalgamate all my 'feeds' and bookmarks, but I was talking to one of our Famebook teccy's the other day and he has simply designed his own 'homepage', which is I imagine, if not now then soon, an option many might pursue from a seemingly impartial provider (as a download or service). At that point, Google or whoever simply become just a small search button in the corner!

Secondly this isn't really about monetising individual content items, as much as it is new and existing brands ring fencing their own quality environments and creating their own value for it by relevance and traction. You only have to look at the brilliant Samir's Glam Media to see it can be done right or conversely to some of the world's oldest newspaper brands who have let Google permeate their front pages and/ or business models and whose best efforts to sustain their core values have been to contract out their ad sales on a CPM basis via third parties.

In my opinion, the future will actually be about being the de facto destinations for types of content via a 'single window provider' and instead of the catastrophic effect of trying to charge to see the horse, when it has already bolted...which is what newspapers are doing, they need to be focusing on the roots of their industry...exclusive stories, focused articles, celebrity content etc. etc. I am certain that advertisers of household name brands will be equally glad of an opportunity to work their ad budgets within elegant environments and pay accordingly, as much as Google and Facebook and all the others alike, are equally totally incapable of offering one themselves!

I say look to Demand Media quietly (or not) ingratiating themselves with niche audiences and sharing the profits with some of them too, and also a gradual Microsoft to Apple type shift away from Google from those who are all searched out and want to narrow the window again! Also my own idea of user-generated advertising within our own social networks! (That would truly then define hyper-local as a model...and is I believe the next big thing!)

Fun times nevertheless.

-- Mr Thomson said, "Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google but it's terrible for content providers." He said that Google doesn't distinguish between the quality of the content around which it serves up ads, it is concerned with quantity rather than quality. --
And if newspapers could crank out that quantity and mimic that model, they'd do it in a heartbeat. The directive wouldn't come from a newsroom or content generation level, but one of the suits in a corporate office would be clamoring for the old 30% margin days. If that means "quantity over quality" so be it. Unfortunately the delivery model is too damn expensive: paper, plastic, gas to throw it on your lawn. Phbbttt!
Saying Google devalues everything it touches sounds so bitter. The consumer determines what has value. Google has found a way to offer content with little or no cost. The content providers -- WSJ, NYT, AP -- were the ones who gave away the farm. They set the rates. They have no one to blame but themselves.

They still make buggy whips since the automotive industry took over the horse and buggy. So just the same, I am sure there will be printed newspapers as the Internet continues to take over the print media.

Oh, please, Mort. That whole coffee and newspaper thing is so quaint. I'll bet you have a cat, too.

Devalues from whose perspective? the individual using Google search? the content provider? the advertiser? the Google shareholder?

Where do we share definition of "value," and where are we at odds?

Multi-media, video, print, blogs, online interviews with the real decision makers, quality micro-pundits and a long line of choices raise the bar for the 250 year old newspaper business. They still have very valuable info to distribute....but they have dare we say: "Competition" for eyeballs!

Once was a time when IBM was the biggie, then it was Microsoft, now it's Google. When you think about it, layer, upon layer, upon layer. What's going to sit on top? What do customers want and what does the business model look like? Maybe a personal digital agent/ profiler who keeps track of things it thinks you might want to know and evaluates trusted source of content?

Dream on, Dream on. Not only are print newspapers on their collective death bed but magazines and books.
That does not mean that the desire for news or fiction or anything else will go away but just migrate to web-based delivery.

Remember, a newspaper or magazine or book is just a delivery model for information.
Stephen Haliczer

Isaacson complains that Google is "terrible for content providers" because it "allows ads to be spread all over the Web." The subtext here is pretty obvious: "Google is terrible for content providers that had a stranglehold on readers and advertisers until the Web came along."

It's true that newspaper brands have value on the Web, but the owners of those brands need to decide what business they're in: the newsPAPER business or the news business. They also need to figure out how to cope with the major audience differences between printed newspapers and Web sites: The former tend to reach local readers who fit known demographic profiles, while the latter reach global audiences who are more fluid demographically and may have different mindsets when they visit a news site as opposed to, say, a consumer-electronics or travel-planning site.

Finally, the type of non-news content that works in a newspaper may not work so well online. Travel (my own site's topic) is a case in point: On the Web, advertising dollars will tend to flow toward sites where readers are actually planning travel, as opposed to sites (such as online replicas of print newspapers' travel sections) that appeal to armchair travelers as much as they do to active travelers. If a newspaper wants to compete for niche advertising dollars online, it will need to publish the kind of niche content that attracts the readers who are most desirable to advertisers.

Well, I train persons on how to search the web, and how to optimize your use of the web. When we do this, regardless of whether it is Yahoo, Google or Ask, search engines allow negative boolean terms as well as positive.

Like the most common response to flash is "skip intro", the most common negative terms are "no sponsored ads", "no adsense ads", no google ads", etc. This is done so that I do not waste my time with those millions of adsense web pages that litter the Internet because of greedy companies like Google, who may not be doing anything "evil" is surely causing their own brand of purgatory.

>That whole coffee and newspaper thing is so quaint.

Agree, but it's more than quaint, it's a sign of desperation; the last defense.

I have been an online content provider for 14 years now, before anyone cared about what we did. I've also been an active member of some of the leading seo forums over the years. During that time, I've seen this 'toilet reading defense' trotted out for every form of print. I never thought it would save the newspapers, it hasn't. I did think it might save coffee-table mags and books but they've now started to feel the loss as well.

What would you expect coming from the death march that is print media? Google was trying to breath life into these ancient mediums. Print news' death warrant was signed long before Google got ahold of them. I predict within the next 5 years 1/2 the newspapers in the USA will be a memory and 1/2 again in 10 years.

News Industry: Please stop asking arrogant journalists who have ZERO experience running a business how to turnaround these businesses. They know some business buzz words; and drop those words. But none (or at least very few) have the business experience to run a busines. So why ask them? To use a cliche, it's like putting the foxes in charge of the hen house.

By value, Mr Thomson means monetary value.
In the offline world competition to a newspaper's advertisers is other newspapers. And those other newspapers have to be available in the same place--which is not that many. Advertisers have to compete for a scarce resource if they want to advertise in that medium, scarcity=high value (monetary.)

Online advertisers can advertise on a newspaper's web site, or on millions of other web sites thanks to Google. There is no scarcity, that means lower costs for ads.

In the Google Adsense world a click is a click whether it is from an advert placed on a page of high quality journalism, or on a page of fart jokes.

Newspapers compete against other newspapers. Online newspapers compete against everything else on the web.

Google can offer inexpensive online advertising and that sets the pricing for all other online advertising.

Why would an advertiser pay more for New York Times if there is a better ROI through Google AdSense, which places ads on millions of web sites? There's the rub: creating quality content doesn't earn higher ad revenues. It might if it is a popular page, but popularity doesn;t equal quality, i.e fart jokes :) This model values quantity over quality.

This is the most interesting problem on the Internet today, imho. How do we pay for quality journalism? What is the value recovery mechanism?

Readers will pay for content as soon as content providers make it painless and convenient. The bottom line is that when people like content, they are happy to subsidize the creation of more from the same source. We're consumers; payment is our voice and our power. We are eager to wield it.

Unfortunately, online news sites are currently focusing on control and tracking as a first step towards payment, and readers who have no problem with payment absolutely detest the inconvenience and invasiveness of membership models. I, like many other people, use bugmenot to access free sites, partly out of spite, and partly because I got tired of maintaining a list of usernames and passwords to free newspaper sites. If content providers create payment systems that are extensions of these invasive, inconvenient, infuriating membership systems, no one will buy. I never had to fill out a form to buy a paper at the corner store.

Instead, content providers should make it easy and convenient for users to pay. Also, they need to show a little bit of creativity and show that they aren't just trying to go back to the good old days. There are so many creative ways to structure a pay site using micropayments -- why not provide a pay system that offers users something they never had before? For instance, let users attribute payment to their favorite articles. If a user pays a few dollars to read some news articles, perhaps it should be possible for him to specify afterwards how his money should be divided among the articles he read. Then a reader isn't just buying the ability to read articles -- he's buying a fine-grained vote about how the newspaper is run. That's something newspaper readers never had before, and it might get people excited enough to try it out.

P.S. Newspapers have always depended not only on the desire of people to be informed, but also their desire to be part of an informed citizenry. In a democratic country, consuming and supporting journalism is a class obligation. There is demand, mostly latent and unfulfilled, for opportunities to support quality journalism. The news industry needs to cater to that demand.
It can't afford to sit tight waiting for consumers to wake up, throw off the giddy misconceptions of the internet age, and start using whatever payment system the industry deigns to offer. The industry will die waiting. Content providers need to create new payment systems that consumers find natural and unobjectionable. iTunes shows that paying for content becomes normal when the right payment system appears.

Tom,

It is allowing Google to establish the Trojan Horse of Search & AdSense within their Newspapers and Magazines that is the issue here.

If collectively those in the content industry ring fenced those environments and removed all third party involvement, they could then extracate themselves from valuations based on volume and build a revenue model based on relevance.

We as you know are developing that on a big scale with Famebook, but I have proven that with my Wife's small town portal business where in one example a modest site serving a population of just 23,000 creates renewable ad revenues of over $250,000 per annum. We don't outsource our ad sales and no Google adsense boxes either. We set our own value and our advertisers have been happy to pay at that rate year after year.

If the newspapers all agreed to cut off the trickle of income via third parties and set their sales teams to work properly, the return would imho be substantial.

After all what's the point in being able to search the web if there is nothing relevant to each of us at the end of it?

Regarding the future of journalism, if journalism is to have a sound future, it needs to do a better job with publishing and promoting its online video content. I've recently authored a white paper on this subject, "Video SEO Can Save the Newspaper Industry", which has all the information here:
http://www.prweb.com/releases/reelseo/newspapers/prweb2085374.htm