The newspapers need the GaF clicks. That is why they give permission for GaF to use their property.
GaF need the newspapers for the clicks to get eyes on their advertising.
GaF haven’t had to pay for this symbiosis relationship so far anywhere in the world.
It is not good enough that the newspapers are forced into an ‘all or nothing’ decision. GaF shouldn’t threaten to boycott the newspapers if they have to pay for the content that they make huge amounts money from.
The first study followed 20 participants from a representative sample to look at online habits. The second Pew Research study had around 4500 participants which is a valid representation of the wider population (in Australia, around 1000 sample size is considered representative indication of the whole population).
These surveys are valid and show there is a significant proportion of the population which rely on social media platforms for their news.
I personally don’t rely on such platforms (and like you go to the media sites directly), but am aware of others that do. Just because I don’t use them, it doesn’t means the rest of the population is the same.
Edit. Countries like Russia exploit this social media news trend and has been shown to post ‘fake news’ in attempt to change the views of the masses.
The platform is that which generates revennue from the Google ads. It is worth reading how Google generates income from its embedded advertisements if you have time. As outlined above (and some sort if forenic analysis isn’t needed), Google has confirmed it generates revenue from the advertisement in news it presents. This confirms the advertisements placed in news content generate revenue for Google which would have otherwise been generated by the news agency sites.
Edit: it would be nice if Google was carrying out a public service, hosting content from others, to help others increase their revenue while Google doesn’t…but, Google is principally a profit driven advertising company trying to dominate this space in the world. Google and public service in the same sentence is a bit of an oxymoron.
“News content brings significant benefits to the digital platforms, far beyond the limited direct revenue generated from advertising shown against a news item. News media businesses should be paid a fair amount in return for these benefits,”
Matters relating to adverting and dominance/power of Google and Facebook are covered in chapters 3, 4 and 8 of the ACCC report.
The ACCC recognises that the news content form news agencies provides many benefits including direct revenue (to social media platforms) generated by advertising content in a news story.
You seem to have views which appear different to the ACCC and many news agencies, and it would be interesting to see if there is any evidence from reliable sources which support these views.
Chapter 5 is what I was referring to where it talks about advertising in news content and monetisation of content. Interesting it singles out Apple news, and says Google news is only a minor player. Most google users just use the search function apparently with very few clicking on the news tab.All news outlets seem to have a pretty bad time with Apple which is not surprising. As for these platforms paying for what they do very well the arguments are less than convincing. They should have seen this coming years ago and developed their own platforms. There is whole section on news snippets which in the end can’t decide whether its beneficial for either party.
I’d have beaten you to the post, but I was too busy rolling around the floor laughing about how much we would benefit from such a reduction in fake news !! The SugarMountain really does take himself way too seriously … this made my day !
Not necessarily. My post got delayed when I included but deleted words about how great it would be with no FB at all We would have to ring friends or actually visit for real face time. Zoom? Always alternatives to keep in touch, each with +/-'s.
I added that to my FB timeline and then came back to the forum losing precious seconds to be the first, yet snuck in
P.S.
I’m left thinking instead of voting at Australian elections I need to buy up shares in Google and Facebook. Enough to decide who gets to run our lives. Perhaps that is over thinking it! What next - Corporations suing nations for not letting them making their own rules?
Like many people, I am trying to get my head around the details and get through the forest of misinformation to the truth. Fairly obviously, all the players are companies who are out to make a buck and wouldn’t be shy about distorting the truth in order to promote their own interests.
The above quoted statement seems to match what I observe.
Via a web browser, Google News presents no ads on the page of list of headlines and when I click on one of the headlines, it seems to open the real newspaper web site as a new web page. (It is true that the link is “click through” Google’s web site, so Google will know that I have clicked on that story and they can feed that into their data mountain for future pimping of my privacy.)
Via the Google News app, there are again no ads on the list of headlines and when I click on one of the headlines, the app shows the whole story. It doesn’t open the web browser.
I was using stories from news.com.au for test purposes.
I can’t compare where the ads are coming from because I get no ads at all in the web view. I guess my web browser must be blocking ads.
I think this illustrates one of the difficulties for the government. It isn’t easy to know what the blackbox Google News app is actually doing.
I think part of the problem is that newspapers can’t decide whether they want to be fully subscription only (hard paywall or at least requiring an account and to login) or allow some access without an account.
Presumably if newspapers went fully subscription only then Google News wouldn’t realistically be able to operate in its current model (neither the web site, nor the app, nor perhaps even the search engine). However newspapers would probably lose a lot of potential subscribers that way - and sharing news stories would be even more of a pain than it currently is. Any relaxation of a fully subscription only model can be exploited by Google News.
In the early days of the web, “framing” was considered a problem - at best, “poor form”. What Google News is doing could be construed as the modern day equivalent of framing.
As I understand it, the government’s intent is for Google to put a price on using news articles. They can walk away, pay nothing and use nothing. Or they can agree with an individual newspaper what ongoing price they are willing to pay.
Facebook’s remarks might be ill conceived but they do what they want. They have today changed their terms to read
Update to Our Terms
Effective October 1, 2020, section 3.2 of our Terms of Service will be updated to include: “We also can remove or restrict access to your content, services or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Facebook.”
This is hot on the heels of their blog post saying they might prevent sharing of news. If they go ahead with all this, I’ll be gone. I like reading the news on news sites and then sharing on facebook… its better than sharing the made up fake news. But if I can’t do it anymore, I’m not even interested. I was there for that and a couple of photography groups but I don’t need it. I’ll be back to Flickr for that. I have already deleted my Instagram account because of the sheer quantity of advertising (every 4th post is an ad).
It always seems ludicrous that there are even terms of service - it should be a product agreement if anything given we are the product - but that aside, any specific term is still a minor subset of their overarching policy of “we can do anything with your data we like” … it’s made even more insane by how seriously people take it all - its Facebook after all, it’s not actually useful and real even though it is ‘worth’ billions, for a given definition of ‘worth’. Imagine how crazy it would be if people went bonkers over some product we really needed that had actual value? like rolls of paper for example …
From memory when testing soon after the Google/YouTube came out, there was advertising in the whole story within the app.
I haven’t checked lately (as uninstalled the app after testing), but if Google isn’t running advertising in the whole story today it could be part if their campaign to try and argue they don’t make money from rebroadcasting the news agency article. This might be a political action they have taken, as they are on the record (one of the links in the Google YouTube letter) saying they make modest income from in news advertising.
I saw the same and when reading I thought…I wonder if Facebook will use this to make a political point…start deleting news reposts of users to get users offside. Then with the expected user backlash, they will blame the government…with users potentially supporting Facebook by placing pressure on the proposed legislation.
Let me clarify. The emphasis was on “I can’t compare” the app experience with the web browser experience - because while I do get ads using the Google News app to read the news story, I don’t get any ads at all using the Google News web site (which ultimately opens the real newspaper web site), presumably due to settings / add-ons in my web browser (even though I don’t have any specific ad blocker add-on installed).
I too wondered whether ads might temporarily disappear from the app news story. When did we become so cynical?
We would have to ring friends or actually visit for real face time. Zoom? Always alternatives to keep in touch, each with +/-'s.
still trying hard to suppress it …
