newspapers to google: ’show us the money’
February 1st, 2006
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The walled gardens are set to go up at your favorite newspapers.
According to a story on CNET titled "Newspapers want search engines to pay," the World Association of Newspapers is looking to end the "exploitation" they’ve suffered at the hands of search engines by making Google and others pay for print content.
This has all the ingredients of a battle that could get pretty ugly, and the effects could be far reaching.
Some possibilities:
- Google pays (for now), and continues to work on ways to cut out the middleman of print for gathering news content.
- Google says ‘no’ and certain print entities are forced to make a decision: Say goodbye to search engine traffic or not?
The precedence this could set for sites like Monster could be important as well. As verticals like Indeed continue to gather steam and traffic, will Monster begin asking for payola?
And wouldn’t that be an interesting alternative to turning off the faucet altogether?
Popularity: 4% [?]
February 1st, 2006 at 12:25 pm
So, the job boards have to start to pay the customer to list their jobs as it is these jobs that attract the applicant so that the job board can entice them to deposit their CV which, seems to be one of the main things that the job board sees as value!
Can’t see the employers being this smart so they’ll continue to pay silly prices to job boards who don’t fill that many of their jobs. Too much herd mentality…. sheeps, cows, lemmings and any others you can think of. But then maybe…..
February 1st, 2006 at 12:26 pm
Interesting thoughts as ever.
February 1st, 2006 at 11:07 pm
There’s a very bad meme taking shape here, and it’s that Google somehow owes the rest of the ‘net a cut of their action, because without all of us putting free content out there, there’d be no traffic for Google to monetize. It’s as if there’s a giant city on an island, and Google gets to rent billboards on the bridge.
But, the point here is that while Google may not have built the island, it did build that bridge. Moreover, there are no obstacles to anyone else building their own (better) bridges, and selling their own billboards.
The newspapers here are in a somewhat unique position. For years they produced content at a loss, in order to sell ads at a profit. The content built the audience that made the ads valuable. The Internet made it feasible to unbundle these things, and Monster and eBay were really the first to draw blood.
Monster is comparatively in an easy spot. They’re still the gateway to the world for most employers, and I just don’t see that changing anytime soon. People bitch about the price and quality, but they still buy the ads. There are better ways to get traffic (resumes) for your job openings, but they all take a lot more time and brains to implement. Not to mention that the verticals are not building a resume database, which is clearly a major revenue center for the big boards. A handful of people in 2005 talked about cutting bak on boards and using more tools like Jobster; it will be interesting to see how those pan out in 2006. My guess is it will be another growth year for the boards everyone loves to hate.