Look at the data warehouses they have created to consistently support massive web archiving and ordering. Pretty fascinating designs.

Capitalism absolutely depends on competition, hence our keen observation for potential abuse by monopolies.

There is little doubt in my mind that Google isn't approaching a search and information controlling monopoly in practice. He who gathers all the data owns it. They own our clicks/searches and click scoring.

Yes there is competition, but hands down they are the best and own search. I have used Bing, and others and have found them lacking. But even in the face of this powerful search monopoly real time search, and social search as evolved.

Perhaps monopolies can be bypassed in the space of the net, due to its very nature. User needs evolve, and that need drives innovation. Entrepreneurs feed off of that gap between need and availability. No one else is more empathetic to a users real needs than the relentless attention of startups. We'll fulfill what users most need because we won't even consider what they don't need. Big businesses have to deal with the cost of momentum shift within their large structures, and therefore roll onward unable to change course as fast emerging markets.

Look at the data warehouses they have created to consistently support massive web archiving and ordering. Pretty fascinating designs.

Capitalism absolutely depends on competition, hence our keen observation for potential abuse by monopolies.

There is little doubt in my mind that Google isn't approaching a search and information controlling monopoly in practice. He who gathers all the data owns it. They own our clicks/searches and click scoring.

Yes there is competition, but hands down they are the best and own search. I have used Bing, and others and have found them lacking. But even in the face of this powerful search monopoly real time search, and social search as evolved.

Perhaps monopolies can be bypassed in the space of the net, due to its very nature. User needs evolve, and that need drives innovation. Entrepreneurs feed off of that gap between need and availability. No one else is more empathetic to a users real needs than the relentless attention of startups. We'll fulfill what users most need because we won't even consider what they don't need. Big businesses have to deal with the cost of momentum shift within their large structures, and therefore roll onward unable to change course as fast emerging markets.

While you're not advocating it, you are the first (I've seen) to point out how search competition could be explicitly monetized by the newspapers.

Google won because their pages were fast and had no ads. They ran a search charity for a very long time. Their most important technology was putting ads on the page without losing their visitors, that is, inventing the text ad instead of the banner ad.

I was at Infoseek from 1997 until after they were bought by Disney, so I competed against Google back when it was beta.

But there will still be competitors — the blogs and politico.com's. And it's tough for me to see how newspapers will be cheap and agile enough to compete against these.

More about that in my response post: http://elstudio.us/post-the-free-content-blues

Thanks, Chris, for getting me thinking!

That said, certain sections of major publications (WSJ, NYT, WP) have original content that I would pay for (and even Google may pay for). In fact, I pay for my WSJ subscription because I do believe they have unique perspective and unique coverage that is far from commoditization today.

Your comparison to the cable companies is a good one. Does the fact that I can get around cable companies, say via Hulu or piracy, change the basic bargaining dynamics? It's not whether you *can* go around – it's whether in practice people actually do. As long as the cable companies have 90% share, they are going to have bargaining power.

Your point about the search gap is interesting. If people use search engines to discover sites and then go back directly in large volume, that indeed would be a strong counterargument to my argument.

A dominant search engine does cause all sorts of problems if the only way to structure things is by making them free-with-ad-support because then you have a middle man as the only route to profit. In that world, the content providers make less money because they are put in direct competition with all of the other content providers… and, it turns out that the world is awash in content. The only one guaranteed to get good ad-traction is the middle man.

Most of these discussions involve tons of post-hoc reasoning where the free content and use of ads to subsidize our habits are kept constant. The audience prefers lots of great, free content, of course. And, as it turns out, the content providers prefer the juicy margins they used to make. Two poorly kept dirty little secrets…

I think both sides are going to end up needing to give some.

A paper “customized” to each individual's needs .. I get to read writers I like in one place regardless of which publication they are currently affiliated with. Maybe rather than trying to protect their turf, they should concentrate on adding more value to their customers

Besides, this isn't the first time an industry has been in treat of losing control of the distribution ..

Let me employ another real world model to explain. Cable or satellite television. Content owners will negotiate carry fees because of the various networks don't carry them, they don't get seen — period. Channels in demand can get paid; those not in demand might have to pay.

You kind of suggest things should be like that for Google. That it will carry anyone for free, but if someone refuses, it doesn't care — no one channel is big enough as a must include. So all the other content owners lose out, so to speak. They can't get paid their worth.

That's flawed. The fact remains that if you're not in Google, you still can be viewed, so to speak. If I want New York Times content, I can go there. Go on, take out Wikipedia. I know where to find it. I never search on Google for some things that I know I want from Amazon. I've learned where Amazon is, I go there.

This is something I once described as the “search gap.” We know that something like 90 percent of people search on the web each day. But sites do not, on average, get 90% of their traffic from search engines. It tends to be around the 30% range. Why the gap? Because many people, once they've discovered a site, go directly back to it.

We've had a far more competitive situation with search engines in the past, say late 90s and early 2000s. Google wasn't so dominant then. And newspapers nor anyone was able to demand the carry fees you suggest. Actually, it was the opposite. It was far more widespread that search engines pushed the paid inclusion idea — want to be in our results? You pay to make sure we get more than we might normally find.

Honestly, I don't see why newspapers or any content owner should get special treatment over others. Google for all its flaws is a fairly level playing field. Good content rises to the top. Let the papers participate in the same environment as the rest of us.

(I, for one, wouldn't miss Wikipedia).

While the buyer/supplier demands of the “real world” might be interesting, I don't think they apply here.

It suggest that each and every web site should be negotiating with Google for carry fees, as if Google is some type of cable network and that people can only get to the programming if Google carries it. Important channels can charge more, because the network knows its audience

It's not like people are just logging onto Google News to get their news. A sizeable number of people continue to navigate to their favorite news sites. In a world where there are fewer news sites, why wouldn't they be able to charge their users directly?

Newspaper owners appear more annoyed with aggregators, which allow content to be viewed out of context. That said, your arguments regarding Google's bargaining power in search are pretty much unassailable.

Google is only a plus for the newspaper; obviously, it sends them traffic. The newspaper, on the other hand, needs to have the courage to change what they do with that traffic. My suggestions are:

1) Push online visitors to their offline paper. I know, this is going to sound like heresy to some, but the fact is, print ads demand a MUCH higher rate than online ads – the the reason you state – scarcity. Give online readers a teaser to the off line paper, give them community, give them collaboration on a topic and respect for their view points – but if they want your content, they need to read it off line.

2) If you cannot stop putting your content online, then charge for it, but do it in the following way:

a) Allow me to see what other people are paying for that content, and let me see who they are; give me a Digg, but with money as the currency for recommendation.

b) Allow me to decide what an article is worth; don't make me pay a quarter, allow me to pay anything I want, maybe with a minimum; also, I want to buy the single, not the album, but with newspapers, if you know what I mean.

c) Only allow comments on an article if the person has paid for it; start a different type of dialog between the writer and the reader.

d) Allow an ecosystem to develop between someone who is creating content that has value, and a group of people who recognize that value and are willing to pay for it.

f) Although it would bother me, sell ads against content that someone has paid for; I am far from an expert on this topic, but it seems to me that you could charge a premium for an online ads placed next to content that someone has deemed valuable enough to pay for.

Finally, g) allow me to get a full refund for the amount I paid, immediately after I read the article, if I so desire; I may need to tell you why, but I should be able to vote with my dollars on the value of what I'm reading.

Josh

>But if you believe that Google has pretty much nothing to do with the decline of newspapers, isn't the >rest of your post simply a red herring? Why does it matter then that newspapers don't get a rev >share from Google if that has nothing to do with their problems?