BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Tag: google

  • How would Google compete with Google?

    1 comment on How would Google compete with Google?
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    So when someone came along who actually managed to compete with and even frighten Google — namely, Facebook — how is Google competing? By going open. There’s a lesson in that for the rest of us.

    I keep saying that media companies should ask WWGD — what would Google do — in formulating their digital strategies. Well, in Google’s Open Social, we see that the best competition against a growing monopoly is openness.

    So how should we compete with Google or at least challenge its monopoly? Openness. I’ve argued for sometime that we need an open-source ad infrastructure. If the rest of the world other than Google — that is, those who have the other half of advertising Google doesn’t yet have — can gather together and create standards, then Google would be faced with the same decision Facebook is now faced with: whether to use those standards. What organized Facebook’s foes? Ironically, it was Google. Who could organize the nonGoogle ad universe? I see no one on the horizon. That’s why Google keeps growing. We’re letting them.

  • The real media consolidation: Google

    3 comments on The real media consolidation: Google
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    Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch and Ashkan Karbasfrooshan at HipMojo make critical calculations about Google’s growing advertising hegemony. Bottom line: Google controls nearly 40 percent of online advertising.

    Now pair that news with the folding of TimesSelect. Consumers, as we used to be called, won’t support media and journalism with their money. Advertising will. We will become entirely dependent on advertising. And what happens when Google controls the majority of online ad revenue in this country? They’re headed there, for as a TechCrunch commenter points out, Google’s online ad revenue and share of revenue are growing faster than online advertising as a whole.

    On the one hand, we should be grateful to Google for enabling the support of much new media. On the other hand, we should fear teh vice in which Google holds our privates. That’s where media power is consolidating — not in old conglomerates (some of which now depend for a good bit of revenue on who? — on Google.)

    I’m not blaming Google for getting to this point. Big, old media handed them this opportunity on a platter. Google was the one company that truly understood the economics of the open network. It understood that it could grow much bigger enabling than controlling. We in media should have followed that model. We should have asked WWGD. What would Google do?

    So what do we do now? We need new networks that identify and create new marketplaces for new value — greater value than the coincidence of words on a page, which Google sells. We need to create our own high-value networks (e.g., hyperlocal news). We need open networks that compete with the closed aspects of Google; openness is water to the witch of an opaque network like Google’s.

    TechCrunch’s facts & figures, built on HipMojo’s calculations:

    $3.98 billion (Google’s U.S. revenues in the first half of 2007)/$9.99 billion (IAB’s estimate of total U.S. online ad revenue in 1H07) = 39.8 percent.

    For the first half of 2006 the numbers are: $2.732 billion (Google’s U.S. revenues in 1H06)/ $7.9 billion (IAB’s estimate of U.S. online ad revenues in 1H06) = 34.6 percent.

    Update: As one commenter points out below, this means Google is out-pacing the growth of online advertising by a wide margin. Total online advertising revenues grew 26.5 percent year-over-year, while Google’s ad revenues grew 45.7 percent.

    Now ad in Bob Garfield’s chaos-scenario contention that ad spending as a whole will fall because companies will have more direct relationships with customers around media. I saw some things at Dell that back this up (more on that when my story appears in two weeks or so). Google will get an ever-bigger slice of an ever-smaller pie.

  • Support journalism at its source

    7 comments on Support journalism at its source
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    Supporting journalism at its source should be a moral imperative for anyone who depends upon that journalism: reporters, editors, news organizations, bloggers. It’s just enlightened self-interest: Link unto others as you’d wish they’d link unto you. And it is the basis, I believe, of the architecture of the news industry in the future: News organizations should do what they do best and link to the rest. And when they do their best, they should hope that others will link to them. Thanks to the economics of the web this is how journalism will be supported — with links.

    The industry isn’t architected that way now: Newspapers and TV shows replicate the work of others so they can say they did it themselves (when, in truth, they’re merely leeching off the prior art and rarely advancing it). Wire services grab this original content and syndicate it under their logos — a model that made perfect sense when we couldn’t read the news around the world, at its source, with the speed of a click. Bloggers have an ethic of linking to the journalism they write about. News organizations don’t.

    And that, as Matthew Ingram point out, is the problem with the wire services’ deal with Google that enables the aggregator to now display full stories not from the source but from the wires, which usually copy from and distribute the work of the source. A commenter on Matthew’s blog gives him a real-life example: the AP picked up a unique story from the Nashua, NH, Telegraph and that’s what Google displayed — along with other AP clients’ versions — above the original story from the paper. Now I know that the AP has been sensitive to this in many cases; they’re not out to hurt their own members and clients.

    Nonetheless, the Google deal does rob traffic, thus revenue, from the paper that invested in journalism. And that will not help sustain journalism.

    Note that the Nashua editor chuckles because Fark.com picked up the story and linked to the original — we pride ourselves in that in this world — and sent it good traffic. So Fark served journalism better than the wires and Google. That is telling.

    This is not a matter of just credit and pride. This is about supporting journalism at its source.

    And it wouldn’t be hard to do. Whenever reporters at a wire service — or a newspaper, web site, TV station, magazine, or blog — sit down to write a story, they should include links to their source material, whether that is others’ stories or web sites or original documents . . . or even, yes, Wikipedia. We bloggers do it, it’s not hard. If they’re writing this for online, the links should appear as they do in blog posts. If for some other, older medium, then they should at least be available online.

    It’s only right.

  • Link v. read

    9 comments on Link v. read
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    I understand why the Associated Press and three other wire services negotiated to get money out of Google — money’s money and the wire-service model is challenging when links supersede syndication.

    But I wonder whether this could backfire on the newspaper industry. Now — by forcing full wire-service stories to be on display at GoogleNews and with the addition of comments as content there — it’s likely that people will stay longer at Google and link less to news sites. This includes the wire services’ own clients, where readers used to have to go from GoogleNews to read wire stories. So even though it could sound like good news that Google is paying for content, this could reduce traffic to newspapers.

    It’s not as if this isn’t a lesson learned: Yahoo licensed content and it is notoriously bad at sending traffic to news sites. It’s almost as if the industry just gave Google a license to hold onto readers.

    I think this all displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of Google in the new news architecture and the way to take advantage of that. Rather than getting Google to pay for and display full content, wouldn’t it have been better for the industry — and, by extension, original journalism — to encourage it instead to find more ways to link to reporting at its source?

    I keep saying that the industry is not assessing the real threat of Google: It’s advertising. Google is taking over the market for targeted — and next, local — advertising and we are letting them. That is the threat. And they are not assessing the real benefit of Google: links.