The estimable John Battelle on yet another brick in the wall…
There’s an old maxim in the news business: Stories in which a dog bites a man are uninteresting. But a man biting a dog? Now that’s worth writing up!
Last week Google released a report on the value of news to its business. Its conclusions minced no words. Here’s the money quote: “…news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google.”
On first glance, Google’s experiment feels like a Dog Bites Man story – everyone knows news doesn’t drive advertising revenue – hell, I lived that truth most of my career, most recently with The Recount, which attempted to convince advertisers to support high-quality news coverage across video and social media (we couldn’t). But look a bit closer, and you might just see a Man Bites Dog story after all.
To understand why, we’ll need to go into a bit of background (those of you already deep in this story, you can skip the next few grafs.) The news business has had a tortured relationship to the tech industry for decades – first as it attempted to adapt to the Internet, then as it realized in doing so, it had been disintermediated, first by Google, and later by social media (and Apple’s iOS). The reasons for the news’ industry’s decline are too numerous to review here, but the results are clear: Overall, the sector is losing outlets, practitioners, revenue, and audience.
This has caused considerable alarm both inside the industry and within (certain) governments. The most notable of these is the European Union, which passed legislation in 2019 that mandated Google (and other intermediaries) share revenues with the news industry (the specific portion of the law that impacts Google’s revenues is Article 15, also known as “the snippet tax.”)
Google claims that when it shows a portion of a news article to its users, it’s doing both the user and the publisher a service. Publishers claim that by showing that snippet, Google subverts their business model, poaching the customer’s attention, relationship, and resultant revenue that the publisher would otherwise enjoy.
To prove otherwise, Google’s report details an experiment (PDF download) that removed all European news content from Google’s Search, Discover, and News products over a period of roughly three months. The idea was to determine whether the loss of this content had any impact on Google’s overall revenue.
The answer, as we’ve already seen, is no.
Despite being passed more than five years ago, details of how the EU legislation will be implemented in the real world are still being negotiated. Google’s report is intended to impact those negotiations with “proof” that a snippet tax is based on faulty logic. After all, how can you tax a company for stealing news revenues when, in point of fact, news creates no provable increase in samesaid company’s revenue in the first place?
This is where the story veers into “Man Bites Dog” territory. Google’s logic seems straightforward. But this argument is a classic example of a false dilemma (with a side of grading-your-own-homework tossed in for good measure).
The false dilemma is this: News has no value because news doesn’t add revenue to Google’s bottom line. To this assertion I call bullshit. Sure, Google might not make money from news. But publishers certainly do. And is news worthless to Google? Hardly.
Let’s start with the fact that Google has not one, but two major products that depend on “news.” (So does Apple, for what it’s worth). Both even call their product News! Google’s second is Discover, which for those of you who aren’t on Android phones, is the river of stories that comes up when you “swipe right” from the home screen (it’s also known as “left of home.”) Both News and Discover are massive engagement honeypots for Google (and Apple). They might not drive a ton of direct advertising revenue, but they are crucial to both companies’ overall product satisfaction. Why would either Google or Apple even build and maintain these products if “they have no value?” The answer is they wouldn’t.
If you dig into the data that came out of Google’s experiment, you can see why. While they remained constant for Search users, Daily Active Users (DAU) declined significantly – nearly 6% – for the company’s Discover product. Put another way, when Google yanked “real news” out of its Discover product, a fair number of people stopped using it. That didn’t happen with Search (down just .77%) or News – which in fact showed a significant uptick of 1.54%. Why?
Well, as a serious user of all three products, I have a pretty strong opinion. As it stands today, Discover is a crappy Instagram clone, only with more news content (Instagram and its parent Meta have spent the past few years eliminating fact-checking and down-ranking news in its feeds). The only reason I engage with Discover is for the often-pleasant surprise of a news story that is relevant to me. Take those out, and I’ll use Discover a lot less.
Google’s News product, on the other hand, is filled with mostly “quality news” stories. Take out all the European news, and what do you have left? Well, loads of content from non-EU based news publishers, as well as any engagement bait that has made it through Google’s “real news” filters.
In effect, Google “Instagram-ified” Discover when it eliminated all reputable European news, and it also “globalized” its News product (and likely added a side of clickbait). Users were likely initially confused by this, but they acted rationally: Those who went to Discover because it featured European local news started to abandon the product.
Those who went to Google News, on the other hand, found other reputable news sources (there are plenty) and probably didn’t notice the lack of local news, at least initially. They might have even enjoyed seeing stuff they usually miss, given their European identities. But one thing is certain: They went to a site dedicated to news, and they got news.
It’s hard to say exactly what happened here, because the report didn’t go into much detail. But Google did report where people went after they engaged with these two lobotomized products. The top outbound domains were, according to a footnote in the report: youtube.com, infobae.com, facebook.com, wikipedia.org, and pinterest.com. YouTube is fast replacing traditional news as an information source. Infobae is a fast-growing Spanish-language news site based in Argentina. That probably explains what happened in Spain. Facebook? Anybody’s guess what that’s all about, but since I’m writing this post, I’m going to guess Facebook’s famous engagement bait won the day there. Wikipedia is a famously trusted source of truth on the Internet. And….Pinterest?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Pulling back, I think it’s fair to say that Google’s experiment falls somewhere between “vaguely well-intentioned” and “deeply cynical.” The company set out to prove something it already knew: It makes almost no direct revenue from news content. But it spun the resulting data into a narrative that it believes will allow the company to avoid sharing revenue with real news outlets under the EU directive.
“In other words,” Google’s report concluded, “the experiment worked as intended.”…
As we fumble the fourth estate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1881 that a celebrated hoaxster (and exploiter of the axiom “nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public”) took on partners: “P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus: The Greatest Show on Earth” joined forces with James Bailey and James Hutchinson. By 1887, the re-branded circus went by the name “The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth.”
Hippodrome poster featuring Sarah l’Africaine, female charioteers, and a Miss Cozett from America as “the woman Mazeppa”. Musée Carnavalet.
Susanna Forrest takes a deep dive into a fascinating subculture that lasted for almost a century: the Amazons of Paris…
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the social range of people who could ride for leisure widened, and more and more women rode. This was because horses became more accessible, but for women it was also due to an improvement in the sidesaddle. I will write more about sidesaddles and my – to me – unexpected love for them in another issue of the newsletter. All you need to know here is that in the early 1830s, either in England or in France, a much-disputed innovation made these saddles more secure, which meant in turn that women could attempt greater feats: more daring jumping, more radical “tricks”, and more sophisticated high-school or haute-école dressage.
The term “amazon” was adopted to deal with these new horsewomen. The implication was of fearless, perhaps manly women like the she-warriors who fascinated classical Greece. They were overstepping into a male world, and while they were often admired, there was also something not quite feminine – or perhaps threateningly hearty – about them. The term is used in multiple European languages at this time. In French, it was also part of the term for riding sidesaddle, “monter en amazone” and for a sidesaddle riding habit or “amazone”, often masculine in style from the waist up, with, later in the century, breeches under an apron rather than a flowing skirt. Gradually the term became more feminised and general and seemed to be applied to any horsewoman.
The earliest named women performing on horseback are Philippine Tourniaire and Patty Astley in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the time, male performers did acrobatics and other stunts on horseback, and the women followed suit…
The Amazons were in the ring from, roughly speaking, the 1830s to the early twentieth century, when both circus and circus horsewomen were falling from fashion. They travelled across Europe and sometimes further afield to dance on and ride their horses, which leaves me with a huge variation of place, time, language, social class, and style of performance spread across many archives. I’ll try to both generalise here and introduce you to the subtleties of their professional and personal lives…
It’s an exciting ride. Stuntwomen, dancers, acrobats, jockeys, charioteers, Olympians, actresses, courtesans, dressage riders – and more: “Who were the Amazons of Paris?” from @Susanna_Forrest.
* Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
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As we saddle up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that The Carol Burnett Show aired the last of its 279 episodes; Ms. Burnett had decided, after 11 seasons, to move on. The series had won 25 primetime Emmy Awards; it ranks number 17 on TV Guide‘s list of the 60 Greatest Shows of All Time, and figures in most “100 Best series” lists.
Consider, for example, the iconic “Went with the Wind” sketch…
How many new ways can there possibly be of throwing a bunch of balls up in the air and catching them? I mean, people have been juggling for thousands of years. There’s even an ancient Egyptian tomb that includes this wall painting of what sure looks like juggling [illustration above].
So as a modern juggling performer, how do you keep your routine fresh? Is it all about the patter and the performance? Or is there still room for innovation in the art and craft of throwing balls to yourself?…
With the help of professional juggler Luke Burrage, he finds some fascinating examples:
As we stay aloft, we might send amazingly entertaining birthday greetings to John Bill Ricketts; he was born on (or around, records are sketchy) this date in 1769. An English equestrian, famed for his trick riding, he was also an impressario– who brought the first circus performances to the United States in Philadelphia in 1793.
John Bill Ricketts, aka, Breschard, the Circus Rider, by Gilbert Stuart
Acro-balancing in Circus and Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, fall 2017
Meg Wallace, of the University of Kentucky, teaches the philosophy course that I wish I’d taken…
The circus is ridiculous. Or: most people think it’s ridiculous. We even express our disdain for disorganized, poorly run groups by claiming, disparagingly, that such entities are “run like a circus.” (This isn’t true, of course. The amount of organization, discipline, and hard work that it takes to run a circus is mind-blowingly impressive.) But this is one reason why I teach Circus and Philosophy. I want to show students a new way into philosophy – through doing ridiculous things.
It seems strange that philosophers often teach philosophy of art, philosophy of sport, philosophy of the performing arts, and so on, without having the students at least minimally participate in the activities or artforms that are being philosophized about. This lack of first-person engagement is especially unfortunate when the topic at hand crucially involves the perspective of the participant– the painter, the dancer, the actor, the aerialist, the clown. Circus and Philosophy is an attempt to explore this participation/theorizing gap. (Another aim is just to magic-trick undergrads into loving philosophy.)
…
[The circus is] rich with potential for deep discussions about an array of philosophical topics in aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, personal identity, mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and so on. It is also intrinsically interdisciplinary, so students with interests and majors outside of philosophy can easily find a way in…
As we benefit from the big top, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that another instructive family of entertainers, The Simpsons, made their debut on television in “Good Night,” the first of 48 shorts that aired on The Tracey Ullman Show before the characters were given their own eponymously-titled show– now the longest-running scripted series in U.S. television history.
While circus acts go back to the midst of time, the circus as commercial entertainment dates to the opening decades of the nineteenth century. In Victorian England, the circus appealed across an otherwise class-divided society, its audiences ranging from poor peddlers to prestigious public figures. The acts that attracted such audiences included reenacted battle scenes, which reinforced patriotic identity; exotic animal displays that demonstrated the reach of Britain’s growing empire; female acrobatics, which disclosed anxieties about women’s changing role in the public sphere; and clowning, which spoke to popular understandings of these poor players’ melancholy lives on the margins of society.
The proprietor and showman George Sanger (from whose collection the following photographs come) was a prime example of how the circus was to evolve from a small fairground-type enterprise to a large-scale exhibition. Sanger’s circuses began in the 1840s and ’50s, but by the 1880s, they had grown to such a scale that they were able to hold their own against the behemoth of P.T. Barnum’s three-ring circus, which arrived in London for the first time in that decade.
Like many circuses in the nineteenth century, Sanger’s was indebted to the technology of modern visual culture to promote his business. Local newspapers displayed photographs alongside advertisements to announce the imminent arrival of a circus troupe. Garish posters, plastered around towns, also featured photographs of their star attractions. And individual artists used photographic portraits, too (in the form of the carte-de-visite or calling card), to draw attention to their attributes and to seek employment. One striking image in this collection [the image above] poses six performing acrobats amid the other acts—a lion tamer, an elephant trainer, a wire walker, and a clown—in one of Sanger’s circuses, all in front of the quintessential big-top tent. Maybe the projection of the collective solidarity of the circus in this image belies personal rivalries and animosities that might have characterized life on the road. Moreover, at the extreme edge of the image, on the right-hand side behind the dog trainer, there appears to be the almost ghostly presence of a Black male figure. By dint of their peripatetic existence, all those employed in the circus were often viewed as marginal and exotic. However, this image is a reminder of how racial and ethnic minorities were a presence within circus culture, even if, as here, they appear to have been banished to the margins of the photograph.
As wehead for the big top, we might recall that today is International Yada Yada Yada Day. Lenny Bruce is often credited with the first use of “yadda yadda” on the closing track on his 1961 album “Lenny Bruce – American,” though earlier uses are documented in vaudeville. Employed by comedians and TV shows to convey that something unimportant or irrelevant was being elided, it gained vernacular currency when Jerry Seinfeld’s show featured a variation on this phrase as an inside joke between characters Elaine Benes (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and George Costanza (Jason Alexander).
The Yada Yada,” the series’ 153rd episode, focused on just how badly using the phrase can backfire when the details being omitted are actually extremely important– the fact that George’s new girlfriend is actually a kleptomaniac who steals to kill time, or that Jerry’s new girlfriend is both racist and antisemitic. (That episode also introduced the term”anti-dentite.”) Hilarity ensues when both these unwitting men find out what kind of people they have been dating, and must break off the relationships.
In 2009, the Paley Center for Media named “Yada, Yada, Yada” the No. 1 funniest phrase on “TV’s 50 Funniest Phrases.”
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