> <i>... these events are happening at a time when the news industry is also being challenged financially</i><p>Yeah, and what's challenging to the "news industry" is the monopolistic situation on the web and the utter lack of action on the part of US antitrust authorities and their allies. I find it very worrying that <i>Der Spiegel</i>, once the most frequently visited ad-supported news sites in the "old" German web, sees no other hope than partnering with Google. Sorry if I'm being too harsh, but the problem can't be solved by Google, when the problem <i>is</i> Google. <i>Der Spiegel</i> once more showing they completely outsold their journalistic punch and demonstrating basic media incompetence (which is the very last thing you want a credible publisher to do).
Just to get a sense for the crowd: am I the only one who doesn't care much about the news industry?<p>Keeping with what's new in society is important insofar as having an informed population is vital for the correct functioning of a democracy. But the "news industry" is 95% gargabe and contributes zero to getting people informed. I firmly believe that if the news industry disappeared tomorrow, we wouldn't be much worse off as a society.<p>That google is a bad player should be dealt with on its own. We shouldn't be using the "news industry" as a justification for breaking google up.<p>EDIT: In fact I had never thought about it, but even as far as keeping people informed, google is better than the "news industry". At least with google I can find links which I use as starting points for reasearching something.
No one forced all news organizations to dump their in house advertising for easily ad blocked versions.<p>They all had perfectly good reasons to not have to deal with the headache of losing money.<p>But that would require keeping the ad sales team they had on board and making a similiar product online.<p>But everyone got scared and lazy and saw a one quarter jump by dumping a bunch of staff.
If google actually creates a good system for paying news media through e.g. microtransactions or group subscriptions which is ONLY there to improve the internet and doesn't benefit google (Get more traffic, get more user data, ...) then this is a good thing. It would be like the google/apple teaming up on the BT proximity tracking apis in android and iOS.<p>If google gets any cut in such a system, or even gets a slight benefit, or even knows who has what subscriptions and uses that information - then I'm completely against it. But if they spend their own money developing platforms that they then have <i>no control over and no benefit from</i> - good! Otherwise - bad!
Will these news publishers also get "demonetized" when they report on something Google doesn't like? I'm not sure I like Google having this much power over (smaller) news organizations.
>To start, we have signed partnerships with local and national publications in Germany, Australia and Brazil<p>Australia was/is gearing up to force Google to pay. Was anything similar brewing in Germany or Brazil?<p><a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/making-facebook-and-google-pay-for-australian-news-is-a-wake-up-call-20200419-p54l7s.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/making-facebook-and-...</a>
Google News has degraded so much in the last few years that it's essentially useless. The combination of their updated material design (or whatever they're calling it) and AMP was a one-two punch. Click through to related articles is always wrong -- none of the articles are related, and there are many dozens more related that don't show. It's just a dead service.
At first I thought this was about some central licensing body regulating and awarding credentials to journalists, just like is done in professional endeavours like medicine, engineering, and law. I was internally debating the merits vs. the dangers (self-regulated or government controlled? Do we want official state-approved press?).<p>Then I realized that it was purely about a distributor musing about paying content providers in the hopes they can influence it, at least ostensibly for "quality".<p>I see nothing wrong with the idea. Money is our way of measuring value, and information certainly has value and Google has been making mint extracting the excess value from information for a long time, to the point that little actually leaks through to the end consumer.<p>I thinks this move would increase the quality of news, but the consumer needs to understand that the product they are consuming is influenced by the media through which they consume it. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, as they say.
It seems Google is feeling a hot breath in the back of the neck since news and publishing orgs were lobbying for draconian interpretations/implementations of the Copyright Directive (which probably would be judicially questionable, still)
I know this is still a very rough idea, but I truly believe the future of content monetization is having some kind of decentralized or even federated payment system and digital wallet that's provider-agnostic and allows people to do "micro-donations", whether it's through upvotes, claps, time spent on the page, or a combination of all of those and more.<p>If this depends on Google, or Paypal, or Apple, and you can only donate to a site if you have PayPal, or if you have Google Pay, or whatever, it will never reach its true potential.<p>It should be kind of like email, where everyone has email. Once everyone has an "email-like" digital wallet, and all of these websites accept "email-like money" through micro-donations, I think content monetization would work much better.
Eons ago when Google started aggregating news they greatly damaged the news industry. This is because you could start seeing the bigger story and the bias in the individual reporting. This was damaging to Fox News obviously.<p>It got worse unfortunately, the journalists were caught faking scenes. <a href="https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-shot/index.html?sr=twCNN110416abc-news-stage-live-shot0715PMStoryLink&linkId=30720260" rel="nofollow">https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/media/abc-news-stage-live-s...</a><p>Then the fake news was discovered: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/plF3WDu.jpg</a><p>Same newspaper, same story, contradictory reporting. Obviously this was done for different places.<p>People started discovering that news is heavily fake. Why buy something when they are outright lying to you? This is the reason the news industry is dying.