I think Rupert Murdoch had a similar beef a few years ago. He was sick and tired of Google linking to articles on his properties. I found that mindset amazing.
If Google scrapes your article and publishes them at its own property passing for its own, that is a huge problem. But if Google shows you up in search results, if it links to your articles from the Google News page, how is that a problem for you? What do you want? Less traffic to your site? I don't get it.
Learn from The Drudge Report about how to survive in this digital age.
French lawmakers want to pass a bill that would tax Google for content it currently indexes for free, after newspapers lobbied for the measure. .... Brazilian newspapers have taken the more extreme step of boycotting Google for the past year. .... The company noted in a letter it directs 4 billion people a month to French publishers’ pages, so a Google ban would be a significant blow to newspapers, too.
How are the Brazilians managing to stay away from Google? Beats me.
The Brazilian newspapers' pioneering boycott on Google News - most newspapers haven't allowed links with news to be displayed on the search engine for over a year - has raised interest abroad. ..... information requests from French, German and Chilean newspapers. ..... boycotting Google News helped to bring down one of the arguments the search engine used, that being featured on the search lists helps to improve audience - which could lead to more publicity revenues. ..... Since the newspapers associated with ANJ, which represent 90% of the market, decided to give up having their articles displayed by the search engine, their traffic declined on average less than 5%. ..... Unlike Brazil, in Germany and other European countries copyrights belong to journalists, not the newspaper.
I still don't get it. Even if you charge people to access your content, showing up in Google's search results would be in your interest, one would think. Scratch, scratch. Why is losing that 5% a good thing?
That's interesting thinking. Obviously Murdoch wants his newspapers to be online but behind paywalls and not accessible through search engines. If you are paying, you obviously know the name and the domain name. Show up and read. You found me when you paid for the subscription.
I don't know where to begin. I mean, a search engine is a good thing, right? Or am I missing something here? Do we want to go back to the good old days of the Yahoo directory?
Murdoch seems to think the internet was designed to save him the costs on paper. ("Why can't you just read the paper on your computer?") Everything else should remain the same.
Image via WikipediaWhen Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace, that was hot property. And he looked like a genius when he paid $500 million for the service, and promptly got Google to pay him $900 million to run ads on the property. And that was the pinnacle. It was downhill after that for MySpace. Murdoch's corporate machine killed the whole operation with the usual jujitsu.
How you do it is you put a corporate guy on top of the whole thing, and that big shot starts thinking he is some kind of a big shot, he fires a few key people, he reorganizes a little bit. After all he has to cast the impression he is actually doing something. And that messes things up. There is no one in charge. The emphasis is no longer on innovation. It is on pleasing the corporate guy who, by the way, wants yet more ads shown on the property, because there are numbers to be met. They don't realize that might take away from the experience because they don't use MySpace in the first place, they just want to be the boss of it.
And now what do we have here? Cisco is flipping Flip. Flip was also hot when it got bought. That is why it got bought in the first place. Flip was supposed to be Cisco's own little iPod, that signature device that everyone but everyone carries and makes Cisco look cool.
Fred Wilson: Going Out On Top: Then, at the top of their game, LCD decided to call it quits. They played four shows this past week at Terminal 5, and then played their last show ever at The Garden last night. It's over now. As we watched the band put on a fantastic show last night, I was thinking about going out on top. So few manage to do it. Shaq is warming the bench in Boston. ..... The money and the burning desire to "win another one" drives the great ones to stick around too long. ..... I look at Warren Buffett and Rupert Murdoch and I see individuals still enjoying the work and delivering for their shareholders and investors into their 80s. ..... But I also look around the venture capital business and I see investors who were at the top of their games in the 90s struggling to remain relevant. ...... How do you know when you've done your last great startup? How do you know when you've done your last great investment? How do you know when you don't have the drive, hunger, and insights to keep delivering top performance? ...... Right now, coming off two weeks of totally relaxing vacation with my family, I find myself up early, thinking, writing, and planning. I don't sense it is yet time to hang up my cleats or walk of the stage like James Murphy did last night. But the thought is in my mind and I want it to stay there. The investment business is not easy. You are only as good as your last trade, fund, or year. And the venture capital business is particulary tricky. All the returns in the business accrue to the top ten or, at best, twenty percent of investors. When you lose your edge, your performance suffers, often badly. But it can take a decade for the rest of the world to notice because there is so much latency in the venture capital business.
My favorite solo blogger just surprised me like never before. The thought of "going out on top" seems to have crossed his mind.
Image via WikipediaMark Suster's three pieces on TechCrunch are a nice summary of what has happened, and what is happening, although if any of this is news to you, I have to ask, where have you been?
When he starts talking about the future, it gets trickier. Social has so much buzz right now that it is hard to imagine the post-social buzz. But that there will be is for sure. There always has been. Social itself will morph. Social is one thing. Social and mobile as a combo is a case of two plus two being five. To that cocktail add local and global and you end up with two plus two equals 22. And it is not easy to figure out.
One good news is I see many, many players emerging.
There are still landowners on the internet - like in the early days of America - who feel like they are the only ones who need to be able to vote. That is blasphemy. Fred Wilson is not new to the debate. But I really like his emphasis this time. Maybe net neutrality is a phrase that is not serving us too well. It makes it sound like there are two equally valid viewpoints. No, there are not. People for segregation and people against segregation were not both equally right. The internet is not a company, it is not a commercial venture. The internet is like the airwaves; it belongs to everybody.
Allan Hoving showed up in the comments section of this blog post: New York Times, Don't Die, Live. Maintaining my good blogger practices, I replied to his comment. We moved from the comments sections to email to the phone to a three way with someone on his team. Some of his demo round people who had gone to sleep came back from the dead.
I have ended up with an arrangement with PayCheckr that leaves plenty of room for my primary startup, and my three active blogs. There is the promise of creating major value with the button, but then there are also the learning opportunities.
Allan took me to a media conference along the L line near the Apple store. The famed NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen was the star attraction. I got up to ask a question.
The team has been telecommuting for the most part. Skype works great for conference calls. And of course there are meetings, with investors, potential partners. Allan is a big picture person. He is the visionary type.
I think PayCheckr is after something big. News, if anything, is more important than ever before. News is not dying, it is thriving like never before. But newspapers are dropping like flies. The blogosphere is expanding like the universe after the Big Bang. Somewhere in there is big money for publishers small and large. That is what PayCheckr is betting on. Money is going to be made.
PayCheckr is a good thing for me to get involved in on the side. I have three active blogs and two startups. My involvement with PayCheckr is good for my own startup: JyotiConnect Inc..
What we have out there is PayCheckr demo. We are working on PayCheckr 1.0. I am hoping PayCheckr 3.0 is a button that an entity like the New York Times would want to put on its site.
What could be PayCheckr's exit strategy? One would be to get the button on 10 million
blogs and sell it off for 10 million dollars. But then the MySpace guys sold MySpace for $500 million and Rupert Murdoch, in weeks, turned around and got Google to pay him $900 million to be allowed to serve ads on the MySpace property. Why did not the founders cut that deal?
As author of this blog, I’d love to have lots of options for readers to send a few cents (or dollars!) my way if they like my writing or find value in it. But this blog could easily get overwhelmed with donation graphics from all the different services! ........ I’ve been looking for the solution, which is an obvious one: a ShareThis-like widget that aggregates all the solutions for payment and/or donation. The first such solution appears to be PayCheckr........ I’ve been looking for someone to come up with something like this, and PayCheckr founder Allan Hoving appears to be the first. Somehow he evaded my radar, since minOnline gave the fledgling service a write-up in late July.
“We have customized everything else [online], why not let us choose how to pay for it?” Hoving says. ...... the button is designed to aggregate the monetization opportunities a site already uses and let the visitor decide how they want to
remunerate the owner. ....... “We may be the delightful, easy-to-use interface between the publisher and the reader,” Hoving says. “We make the introduction and then get out of the way. Another way is to get more involved in transactions and perhaps fulfillments.” ....... At the very least, PayCheckr could be a clearinghouse and analytics engine for monetization opportunities. ...... Hoving has worked in a variety of magazine positions over the years at New York, Rolling Stone and Thomson Financial.
Netizen is the very first blog that put the PayCheckr button on. Let that be noted. History got made.
The PayCheckr button is a piece of real estate that will increase in value as online publishing steps up to the plate, and as the button itself morphs and makes itself valuable and easy to use for publishers and bloggers in general. The challenge is to benefit from the first mover advantage but also spring forth the muscle and finesse of latecomers. It is going to be a wild ride, that's for sure.
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