"algorithm and blues" - the entire article's only redeeming point. But the content itself is the same old. Professionally produced content costs money, he says, and you will pay for it. Fine, I say. Pay for whatever you feel like paying. I'll keep ignoring things I can't find. The best quality material is no longer exclusively at high-reputation big-name sources. As soon as the distribution is more level, and the major differentiating factor is what can be easily found, searchable online content will win. No matter how many CEOs claim otherwise.
Rupert Murdoch has already made many of the points that Les Hinton discussed in this speech, but I think the most interesting item was his claim that click-oriented ads are relatively worthless, compared to simple display advertising on quality news sites like the WSJ.
Another thing that's apparent from reading this is Dow Jones believes Fair Use and weak enforcement of copyright laws are impediments to their operations. It wants to set back the clock to the good ol' days of the news media oligopoly, when information was controlled by a small group of very profitable publishers. But as long as Twitterers, bloggers, and aggregators are able to talk about/reprint small excerpts of news reported by MSM outlets, that will lessen audiences dependence upon the large outlets and keep ad rates down.
Yes that is a funny image - and I agree with your overall point.
Following that quote is one of the most incoherent metaphors I have seen in a while: "It’s been barely a decade since the Internet bubble burst on the information highway to the digital future." That's almost 'internets and tubes' talk.
Sloppy thinking in this speech in general - embodies the 'middle-age dad trying to look cool' even as he seeks to warn others against that trap.
I think there's a fundamental misalignment of interests in the news business between 1) readers who want high-quality, unbiased reporting, 2) advertisers who want to sell something to the readers and are thus biased, and 3) the news companies who want to satisfy both readers and advertisers. The problem is similar to the interaction between a customer seeking financial advice from a financial consultant who makes money selling securities: a consumer can't know whether he's being given unbiased information or a sales pitch.
Perhaps people don't pay for "news" because they don't usually pay for sales pitches.
One way to solve this is to openly declare one's identity. Consumers of unbiased news or entertainment are willing to pay; but the consumer of unbiased news will be more intolerant of paying for the news by seeing ads: how can someone deliver the unbiased news while at the same time being a salesman?
Providers of unbiased news should sell their service, unbiased news, to their customers. Consumer Reports does this very well. They stress the fact that they don't sell advertising and that therefore, their only aim to please their only customer by providing unbiased information.
Most other media have a hard-time selling non-bias because they're not really in the non-bias business. They want to have it both ways: they want to sell unbiased news to readers while at the same time pitch their readers on behalf of their other customers, vendors. To do this they have to sell (perhaps implicitly) their readers on the proposition that bias doesn't matter. At this point most media companies have already lost the customers who understand and value unbiased news. The customers that are left are really looking for entertainment.
If this analysis is right, you should not expect to see the most successful ad-supported news media be unbiased.
Does anyone seriously think these folks don't know about robots.txt?
Folks, it's clearly a form of institutionalized trolling. Various of the folks involved are clearly piling onto the best troll since, well, since the marketeers of some movie managed to get their 2012 troll onto HN.
While I agree that they know about robots.txt and are trolling, these are not your average trolls. They are able to get serious traction because they control a lot of the more traditional venues for information, it's a little more important to call them out.
While a bunch of people at HN saying "robots.txt, duh" will not directly communicate the idea to said CEO, perhaps at some point someone doing research on the topic will go searching for information on the topic. The more counter-FUD we put out there, the better.
These folks +know+ about robots.txt stuff. If not directly, then because some staffer and most any sycophant in range has already pointed to it.
The folks have almost certainly explicitly told the staffers involved not to enable robots.txt, too. (If they truly were fools, they've have already enabled the robots block.)
The point is to trigger the response to the troll, and the hope that the CEO will be able leverage the response to better their own business position. Some trolls deliberately stick typos or errors in their posts. Some folks show their naughty bits. Some make outrageous statements.
The point is not the tech. The point is not the truth.
The point is the the schtick, and the profit potential.
This is the basis of modern media.
It's an effective form of attention-seeking spam.
This doesn't mean I don't think Google should just "accidentally" drop one or two of these organizations from the search indexes. "You're not listed? Whoops. We thought you wanted out of the Google indexes. Our bad." But that'd be both juvenile, and would serve only to get the regulatory folks and legal teams involved all spooled up.
The point is to trigger the response to the troll, and the hope that the CEO will be able leverage the response to better their own business position. Some trolls deliberately stick typos or errors in their posts. Some folks show their naughty bits. Some make outrageous statements.
I've always felt that News Corp was the journalistic equivalent of Mr. goatse.
So for years most newspapers have been little more than AP aggregators, offering local opinion pieces and a few local stories. Then the journal comes in, with a bunch of specialist content, and respected editorial bits, makes a profit selling this, and somehow is in the same market? Isn't that like saying Google and Dell are in the same business because it is computers?
Vaguely related: what ever happened to the micro-payment idea?
At a higher level, even the specialist journals are still essentially performing an aggregator function. The most well-researched, insightful reporting is still just a recapitulation of something else, some a set of facts or opinions that exists independently of the reporting. Journalists do not create content in the same way as authors, musicians, software developers, etc. They go out, gather information of interest to their audience, filter it, repackage it, and distribute it to their readers.
Traditional journalism is effectively information retail. The internet threatens it not by making content free - there is no copyright on reality; the content is already free - but by connecting audiences directly to primary sources. The main advantage that journalism still maintains - a critical and thorough filtering function - is now being challenged by new infrastructure developments, social networking platforms, Twitter, increasing maturity of the blogosphere, etc. These factors diminish news reporting as a packaged product, and return it to the context of an open conversation.
What I think Murdoch and Hinton are really attacking is not news content being made available for free, but the internet revealing that news isn't actually "content" at all. Their business model isn't undergoing a paradigm shift; it's simply going away. Apart from shifting their operations to an entirely different industry, fighting this battle is the only option they have.
Micro-payments are like any other pay-wall -- they imply throwing away the vast majority of the traffic you get from search engines and links.
They've never been rolled out in a serious way, because advertisers are currently paying enough for the unfiltered masses to outweigh the revenue that could be generated by those readers that survive a pay-wall.
As for why those with pay-walls don't use the micro-transaction model -- they can't charge people for what they actually read without the per-story price being large enough to trigger that discrete psychological purchase decision that micro-payments' tiny size was envisioned to avoid.
E.g. An average person paying $5/mo for the WSJ might read 50 stories a month. Ask them for a dime a story and they'll read fewer, reducing your revenue. With subscription pricing they essentially make all that stuff the reader doesn't really want appear to be a feature that, for whatever reason, they do value enough to pay for.
Exactly. I love all this blustering and ranting when all they have to do is install a text file in their home directory. That's it. It would literally take 5 minutes; maybe less. There is no cost of adoption to opting out of the search game. If there was any backbone behind all this rhetoric, they'd have already done it. But there isn't, they want to whine until Bing gives them a truckload of money for exclusivity or they get a government bailout.
Dear news conglomerates,
Please, install the robots.txt file to block search, which all reputable engines respect, and start suing the bloggers and aggregators. Please do this today, so you disappear from the net completely and the information void you leave behind can be filled by lean quality content producers who bitch less.
I don't see what the relationship should really be with robots.txt. Block their site will not make them profitable, it doesn't provide a source of revenue.
They claim to be generating the revenue, only to have it stolen by Google and others. If this was the case, /robots.txt could go a long way towards preventing billions of dollars from "leak[ing] onto the Internet" each year.
I had a different understanding of what the core point was, the google part felt more like a sub point.
My understanding was that since the content is freely accessible on the internet, people don't need to subscribe to newspapers, and that online advertising can't cover for the difference.
I wonder how much their advertising teams cost and if wouldn't it render better results just to fire them and replace all banners with AdSense (or something like it) and live off their ever elongating tails. Those teams are pure overhead - news companies are in the business of reporting news. They should get rid of their fat. This world does not tolerate it.
my guess is that they've run this calculation and have decided against it. or there are top level execs that are in charge of the marketing divisions who don't want to lose jobs and learn something new.
I bet on your #2. There is a lot of money being pocketed in the media market in form of incentives. It's only natural they want to hold on to their jobs.
In general, I'm a fan of this talk. I think these guys are arguing these things for the wrong reasons and don't understand the tech. At its core, they should be playing hard ball. We're becoming a society that just expects everything to be free (in price) and as cheap as possible. Mark Cuban said it best: you live and die by free.
