Google = Parasite?

Ann Woolner, Bloomberg News Columnist, wrote that Newspapers need to control internet ‘parasite’.

In this article, she highlighted the fact that search engines and news aggregators gobble up news often without paying the producers a penny.

This sort of thing “leeches that reporting from mainstream news publications,” as former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon put it this month before a Senate subcommittee.

“The parasite is slowly killing the host,” testified Simon, author and writer of the HBO series The Wire.

While journalists and entrepreneurs look, belatedly, for a way to make journalism work online, newspapers are going bankrupt, their staffs shrinking.

One particular thing that interests me is this:

Thanks in part to a steady diet of free food, Google has grown into a worldwide giant while newspapers have had their guts hollowed out.

Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thompson even specifically slammed Google as “parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet” back in April 2009.

While I agree on her points in regards to news aggregators (i.e., scrappers), she pointedly included Google in the same class. Is it true that Google is a parasite and is killing the newspaper industry?

Personally I think this point of view is very outdated and paranoid. For newspapers to think that their news is the primary commodity is rather too prehistoric. Such is the barrier encountered by most newspaper industry in the advent of Internet age. Remember when they say that video kills the radio star.

Newspaper industry needs to realise that news should only be their “advertisement”: the thing that attracts people to visit their websites. Their visitors, on the other hand, is the real commodity: the revenue source.

Print newspaper and online presence needs to be diversified by utilising each media’s main strength:

• Print: easy access, easy browsability, readability, delivery, wide ranging audience
• Online: convenience, contextual linking, contextual advertising, dynamic contents, contextual audience

Advertising packages needs to be tailor-made for each medium according to the above strengths. Thinking outside the square (marketing avenues outside traditional advertising) can be introduced via their online presence, adding to revenue stream.

It is impossible…no, it is in fact insulting to their own intelligence if they are saying that their online presence is clawing into their print revenue. It is simply saying that they either not smart enough to realise the potential of Internet, or that they are too lazy to think about what to do with the gift from heaven.

And to quote Robert Thompson’s “Google argues they drive traffic to sites, but the whole Google sensibility is inimical to traditional brand loyalty,” well in the context of anti-monopoly presented to Microsoft I must also ask him if it is in fact acceptable to maintain brand loyalty by discouraging the transparency presented by Google? Is his idea of managing brand loyalty limited to obscuring the competition which search engines only make visible to the audience’s naked eyes? Isn’t this a tall-poppy syndrome? Shouldn’t brand loyalty be earned through good site usability? The Internet’s characteristics of flowing to the lowest ground (a.k.a., the easiest site to use) should be utilised as opportunities to outcompete his competition by implementing good site designs and differentiating features, not as barrier to one’s competitive edges.

If they manage to realise these potentials properly, they would indeed be thanking Google in their prayers every morning for providing them with the steady influx of revenue: not visitors buying news but rather advertisers buying their newsreaders.

— Author is an online marketing consultant for a leading news website