Google to newspapers: Put up or shut up

Newspapers in a Vienna coffeehouse. Credit: Alex Barth via Flickr.

Is Google stealing our content? That, anyway, seemed to be the suggestion when a European publishing group announced last week that it had garnered a number of supporters for its Hamburg Declaration, which calls for "urgent improvements in the protection of intellectual property on the Internet."

This week, Google had a reply, which basically boils down to: Put up or shut up.

In a post written by Josh Cohen, senior business product manager, on the company's public policy blog Wednesday afternoon, Google said publishers can easily tell search engines to take a hike. All it takes is a two-line piece of code, which he helpfully included in his post. Tuck that on your website, and no search engine will crawl it; the stories won't show up when people look for content using search engines.

It's unlikely that newspapers will call Google's bluff. Here's why: Google's search engine and its Google News site sends 1 billion visits to newspaper websites each month. Those visitors drive up the traffic numbers that website ad rates are partially based on. More readers = higher ad rates, which is why few publishers will say no to Google's traffic referrals.

Granted, most of those readers don't pay for the stories they read. And that leads to statements like this one from the Hamburg protocol, which was signed by James Murdoch of News Corp., Robert Thomson of the Wall Street Journal and Ian Smith of Reed Elsevier, among others:

Numerous providers are using the work of authors, publishers and broadcasters without paying for it. Over the long term, this threatens the production of high-quality content and the existence of independent journalism.

Sam Zell, whose Tribune Co. owns the Los Angeles Times, has said much the same thing, if only in more colorful terms. "If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" he told a group of incredulous Stanford University students in 2007.

Google's retort to publishers is that it is open to work with them on whatever business model they deem fit. Want only paid subscribers to read? Fine, it can steer clear of the site, or follow a model like that of the Wall Street Journal, which lets readers referred from search engines see the article for free but makes them subscribe if they want to read any other articles on the site. Want the articles to expire after a few days and go into an archive where readers would have to pay to see? There's a line of code for that too.

Right now, the vast majority of newspaper sites serve up free, ad-supported content. And Google said it's happy to send traffic to those sites. Unless, of course, they don't want all those readers.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

Comments

[George Irwin]

It would be appropriate for newspapers to be upset at google if they didn't steal content from each other without paying for it as well. How many times do news broadcasters say, "according to the Washington Post..." or "As reported by TMZ.." so that they too can generate news stories on things they haven't actually done the reporting for and make money off the headlines?

The signed statement above that "the production of high-quality content and the existence of independent journalism" is threatened is a joke, high quality journalism is already dead. Already the journalists have come down to the blogger's level of quality versus quantity; unfortunately there are a lot more bloggers than there are journalists.

[George Fragos]

Google is totally right. A couple of lines is all that it takes and sites have complete control. The problem is not that Google is steeling news it's that the new sites won't change to a business model that works on the web. Much like some welfare recipients they are entitled to money because they exist.

[Gaby]

I find it utterly rediculous that newpapers try to blame Google. They need to get off their lazy butts and sort out their own problems rather than trying to blame someone else. As you state it the article, there is code they could use to solve the issues the are apparently having. Heck, I could go find half a dozen tutorials on it right now through what site? Google!

[Trig Pritchet]

The newspapers and their web developers have *always* known how to prevent Google from "stealing" their content. They have never taken the steps to stop Google from indexing their pages because it would hurt them more than it would help them. News pages would lose gobs of traffic if Google dropped them off the face of the earth. These websites have a choice: act like a good web citizen and enjoy the benefits of exposure through search.

Without search, a news site is just a walled island no one can even find.

[Anthony Emerson]

I think Sam Zell's quote is concise enough that I can point out its flaws in the space of one blog post:

"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?"

A) Just as profitable. You really think Google monetizes from Google News? Hardly. Try the fact that it's indexing and driving users to billions of websites (as opposed to thousands of news sites) and serving ad alongside their previews of that content.

B) Steal their content? Last time I checked, Google news directs users to the source of the story when they click on the headline. Google steals content from news sites only to the degree that they steal content from normal web pages - title and a short description.

[Jason]

Nice image used for this article - from a photo web site. Lucky the photographer is down with sharing

[Dream Producer]

The call for "urgent improvements in the protection of intellectual property on the Internet" is a worthy pursuit; the Google reference assures some hype, but Google is not the real culprit. The shady and unethical SEO marketing types are out there creating software and teaching people to steal content for their own profits. This is the real challenge to protection of intellectual property.