Maybe I’m just missing something, but this Washington Post article, “Zell Wants End to Web’s Free Ride,” doesn’t make sense to me.
Quote:
“If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” Zell said during the question period after his speech. “Not very.”
I’m from the school that sees no logic in that statement. To me, it seems obvious that Google drives traffic to news sites — I can’t read the stories on Google News. To me, even if Zell is correct (and I don’t think he is), then (with an intentionally mixed metaphor) the horse left the barn so long ago that the tooth paste can’t be put back in the tube, even if Zell wanted to.
But Zell is a billionaire and I doubt he’s reading blogs this morning. So perhaps someone should suggest he talk with another billionaire who has spent a few years wrestling with this issue: Patrick McGovern, the founder of IDG and one of the media entrepreneurial icons of the past half-century.
A few years ago, the then-CEO of IDG, Pat Kenealy, created a kerfuffle by suggesting (or, perhaps merely theorizing) something similar to what Zell did. That brief moment in history was recounted in the recent interview with Mark Glaser of the PBS weblog MediaShift, conducted after the recent announcement that the brand Infoworld is ceasing its print magazine version and is going online-only — and that IDG is now a “web-centric” business, not a “print-centric” business.
Quote from the MediaShift interview:
Glaser:Your CEO Patrick Kenealy at one point talked about news aggregators , such as Google News, and didn’t think it was their intellectual property to use snippets of headlines, photos and links. That caused a real stir…
McGovern: Kenealy is now a venture capitalist. [laughs] My first meeting after he left for venture capital was with Eric Schmidt [CEO of Google], and I said, ‘We don’t consider Google to be a competitor; we consider you to be a strategic partner.’
Glaser: Do you feel like Google is a friend or foe?
McGovern: Someone who comes directly to our site has much more business potential than a search engine could deliver. Google does a lot for [boosting] visitor counts but they aren’t as valuable as the core regular visitors. So advertisers will put more value on our regular readers. Some people will use search optimization to play games with Google so that other sites will come up as the place to go for business intelligence software, and won’t be realistic. We think Google is good because it points people to where useful IT information is, and as they become a more consistent buyer, they’ll come back to us. We put a lot of our video content on Google Base so they can sell across that, and we get more views that we can sell [ads] on. We consider them to be a partner and collaborator.
I was going to write more and point back to the many posts I’ve made here that calculate how much of Google’s revenue is, in effect, direct revenue to traditional media via the Adsense program, but I discovered that Jason Calacanis has ripped into Zell rather deftly on his blog so I’ll just point that way and head out the door on a crisp, but beautiful day here in Nashville.
Bonus links: Dave Winer: “Believe it or not I think I understand what he’s saying even though what he literally said makes no sense.”, Doc Searls: “If you don’t want people to read editorial anywhere but on paper, don’t put it on the Web, or embed code that tells search engines not to index it.”, Matthew Ingram: “Either Zell is trying to be deliberately provocative, or he’s a complete ignoramus.”
Another bonus link: Collin Crawford, president & CEO of IDG’s PC World & Macworld: “I suggest Sam Zell and his team quickly adjust their attitude to the internet or they will be joining the dodo.”
April 8th, 2007 at 11:16 am
[...] More on Zell’s comments from Rex Hammock, Frank Gruber at Somewhat Frank and Doc Searls. Google, newspapers, zell | Share This | Related links [...]
April 8th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
[...] Let’s do a thought experiment for a second, and forget that Google News doesn’t actually make a cent off of advertising (although, yes, it might be making it indirectly). [...]
April 8th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
[...] Is allowing Google to index a newspaper’s website “giving it away” — Maybe I’m just missing something, but this Washington Post article, “Zell Wants End to Web’s Free Ride,” doesn’t make sense to me. — Quote: … I’m from the school that sees no logic in that statement. Source: rexblog.com: Rex Hammock’s weblog Author: Rex Hammock Link: http://www.rexblog.com/2007/04/08/16764/ Techmeme permalink [...]
April 8th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
If Google were cruel, they’d just stop searching Tribunes sites off right now.
It’s amazing that some people don’t realize that Google is like the OPEC of the web. You can’t piss them off unless you are truly energy independent.
April 8th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
[...] Is allowing Google to index a newspaper’s website “giving it away” — Maybe I’m just missing something, but this Washington Post article, “Zell Wants End to Web’s Free Ride,” doesn’t make sense to me. — Quote: … I’m from the school that sees no logic in that statement. Source: rexblog.com: Rex Hammock’s weblog Author: Rex Hammock Link: http://www.rexblog.com/2007/04/08/16764/ Techmeme permalink [...]
April 8th, 2007 at 10:24 pm
[...] UPDATE: Zell’s comments on the availability of content (blogged on here, here, and here; HT Instapundit) indicate he actually thinks he lock it up and charge for it. If that mythical ability went into his purchase calculations, he may have overpaid — by a lot. [...]
April 9th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
When Ford’s “Tin Lizzie” (Model T) first went into mass production in 1908, skeptics protested: “But Mr. Ford– your horseless carriage will require a gas-station on every corner!” Ford responded, “Well, that won’t take long.”
Conversely, Mr. Zell recalls IBM’s Tom Watson in the early 1950s: “We don’t think there’s a world-market for more than twelve of these machines (computers)…” Of course, for anything the size of a moving van with the capabilities of Fourth Graders’ hand-calculators, Watson was quite right. But unlike Henry Ford, foresight was not his forte.
Why does Mr. Zell not include indexed print-references in his appraisal? Does citing mythological insights from “Hamlet’s Mill” (1969) constitute taking commercial adantage of its scholarly researchers? Come, come… just such objections were raised by the pre-Reformation Church of Rome, objecting to Vulgate translations that misconstrued its Latin patrimony. Yet Saint Jerome’s own text already conflated many languages, from Aramaic to Hebrew and demotic Greek. In terms of editorial exegeses, the Papacy was guiltier than most.
What do Zell’s obtuse legalisms connote, anyway? We guarantee that with moneybags’ approval or without, however Peking’s commissarskis may wish otherwise, the Internet is here to stay; unlovely “gas stations” will crowd every web-based nook and cranny; and whatever Saint Jerome prescribes will lose alot in Martin Luther’s passionate reworking.
Be off, thou ignorant and self-serving purveyors of guild-made four-in-hands! When we as “informationists” need your advice, we’ll remit compensation akin to Tom Watson’s or the Pope’s. Strange how the size of a portfolio is inversely proportional to the worth of its accumulator.
April 10th, 2007 at 7:21 am
[...] Doc Searls, Rex Hammock, Frank Gruber and many others also piled on, making similar points. [...]
April 10th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
I think Zell just plain doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He has no concept of how things work on the Web, and is quite afraid of the change it represents. The fact that he conceives Google would not be at a loss for profits if not for Google News says it all.