Don't Google Us
Posted by Ian Holsman
Reuters is carrying a story (which I saw on memeorandum ) about how content providers are getting upset about google ‘stealing’ ( they call it aggregating) their content and commoditizing it.
They are in a very tough situation. On one hand they love the traffic the search engine brings to them, on the other they hate the commoditification of their IP and making their editors choices of what is ‘interesting’ redundant. (you can pick from over 1,700 places to read about the passing away of Coretta Scott King for example).
But the problem they face with google is that they are easily replaced with other news sources (do you care if you have 1,700 places or 1,699?)
The other sad fact is that most of those 1,700 ‘stories’ come from the same wholesale news-services (retuers, or AAP for example). and they are playing a arbitrage game.. (the cost of the feed vs the revenue from ads and subscriptions).
In the economoics lectures/books i’ve been reading lately one of the basic premsises of scarcity. If you are the only one to have something it is more valuable than if everyone had it.
So my suggestion to the major online content providers who think google is a threat.. change the game.. don’t re-publish stories (or if you must don’t let google see them) from a feed, concentrate on unique content which can’t be made into a commodity. The only people to lose out in that would be the Feed providers. (and the aggregators)