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.”
A graphic– and painful– reminder that the latter two are under constant attack…
Think about a personal and private google search and post it on this website. Something you might not have told the ones dearest to your heart. Google uses these searches to generate a data profile of you to sell on open bidding markets. This website creates a bubble for each search to remind us of all the data collected…
Every time we ask Google, we give it answers about ourselves: “Search TM.”
* Gabriel García Márquez
###
As we Duck (Duck Go), we might recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Hormel introduced Spam. It was the company’s attempt to increase sales of pork shoulder, not at the time a very popular cut. While there are numerous speculations as to the “meaning of the name” (from a contraction of “spiced ham” to “Scientifically Processed Animal Matter”), its true genesis is known to only a small circle of former Hormel Foods executives.
As a result of the difficulty of delivering fresh meat to the front during World War II, Spam became a ubiquitous part of the U.S. soldier’s diet. It became variously referred to as “ham that didn’t pass its physical,” “meatloaf without basic training,” and “Special Army Meat.” Over 150 million pounds of Spam were purchased by the military before the war’s end. During the war and the occupations that followed, Spam was introduced into Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, and other islands in the Pacific. Immediately absorbed into native diets, it has become a unique part of the history and effect of U.S. influence in the Pacific islands.
… or so it used to be. Scientists at Google DeepMind and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have applied AI to the task– with encouraging results…
Modern technologies from computer chips and batteries to solar panels rely on inorganic crystals. To enable new technologies, crystals must be stable otherwise they can decompose, and behind each new, stable crystal can be months of painstaking experimentation.
… in a paper published in Nature, we share the discovery of 2.2 million new crystals – equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge. We introduce Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME), our new deep learning tool that dramatically increases the speed and efficiency of discovery by predicting the stability of new materials.
With GNoME, we’ve multiplied the number of technologically viable materials known to humanity. Of its 2.2 million predictions, 380,000 are the most stable, making them promising candidates for experimental synthesis. Among these candidates are materials that have the potential to develop future transformative technologies ranging from superconductors, powering supercomputers, and next-generation batteries to boost the efficiency of electric vehicles.
GNoME shows the potential of using AI to discover and develop new materials at scale. External researchers in labs around the world have independently created 736 of these new structures experimentally in concurrent work. In partnership with Google DeepMind, a team of researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has also published a second paper in Nature that shows how our AI predictions can be leveraged for autonomous material synthesis.
We’ve made GNoME’s predictions available to the research community. We will be contributing 380,000 materials that we predict to be stable to the Materials Project, which is now processing the compounds and adding them into its online database. We hope these resources will drive forward research into inorganic crystals, and unlock the promise of machine learning tools as guides for experimentation…
As we drive discovery, we might recall that it was on this date in 1942 that a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi, working inside an enormous tent on a squash court under the stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field, achieved the first controlled nuclear fission chain reaction… laying the foundation for the atomic bomb and later, nuclear power generation– that’s to say, inaugurating the Atomic Age.
“…the Italian Navigator has just landed in the New World…” – Coded telephone message confirming first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, December 2, 1942.
Illustration depicting the scene on Dec. 2, 1942 (Photo copyright of Chicago Historical Society) source
Indeed, exactly 15 years later, on this date in 1957, the world’s first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station, reached criticality; the first power was produced 16 days later, after engineers integrated the generator into the distribution grid of Duquesne Light Company.
The dangers of rapid scaling: Praveen Seshadri on what ails Google and how it can turn things around…
I joined Google just before the pandemic when the company I had co-founded, AppSheet, was acquired by Google Cloud. The acquiring team and executives welcomed us and treated us well. We joined with great enthusiasm and commitment to integrate AppSheet into Google and make it a success. Yet, now at the expiry of my three year mandatory retention period, I have left Google understanding how a once-great company has slowly ceased to function.
Google has 175,000+ capable and well-compensated employees who get very little done quarter over quarter, year over year. Like mice, they are trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews, documents, meetings, bug reports, triage, OKRs, H1 plans followed by H2 plans, all-hands summits, and inevitable reorgs. The mice are regularly fed their “cheese” (promotions, bonuses, fancy food, fancier perks) and despite many wanting to experience personal satisfaction and impact from their work, the system trains them to quell these inappropriate desires and learn what it actually means to be “Googley” — just don’t rock the boat. As Deepak Malhotra put it in his excellent business fable, at some point the problem is no longer that the mouse is in a maze. The problem is that “the maze is in the mouse.”
It is a fragile moment for Google with the pressure from OpenAI + Microsoft. Most people view this challenge along the technology axis, although there is now the gnawing suspicion that it might be a symptom of some deeper malaise. The recent layoffs have caused angst within the company as many employees view this as a failure of management or a surrender to activist investors. In a way, this reflects a general lack of self-awareness across both management and employees. Google’s fundamental problems are along the culture axis and everything else is a reflection of it. Of course, I’m not the only person to observe these issues (see the post by Noam Bardin, Waze founder and ex-Googler).
The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.
(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement…
As we go back to basics, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that a boy was born to University of Wisconsin graduate students Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali. He was given up for adoption and taken in by a machinist and his wife in Mountain View, California. They named him Steve Jobs.
On which senses do great creators rely? Randall Collins investigates…
Beethoven started going deaf in his late 20s. Already famous by age 25 for his piano sonatas, at 31 he was traumatized by losing his hearing. But he kept on composing: the Moonlight Sonata during the onset of deafness; the dramatic Waldstein Sonata at 32; piano sonatas kept on coming until he was 50. In his deaf period came the revolutionary sounds of his 3rd through 8th symphonies, piano and violin concertos (age 32-40). After 44 he became less productive, with intermittent flashes (Missa Solemnis, Diabelli variations, 9th symphony) composed at 47-53, dying at 56. His last string quartets were composed entirely in his head, left unperformed in his lifetime.
Handel went blind in one eye at age 66; laboriously finished the oratorio he was working on; went completely blind at 68. He never produced another significant work. But he kept on playing organ concertos, “performing from memory, or extemporizing while the players waited for their cue” almost to the day he died, aged 74.
Johann Sebastian Bach fell ill in his 64th year; next year his vision was nearly gone; he died at 65 “after two unsuccessful operations for a cataract.” At 62 he was still producing great works; at 64 he finished assembling the pieces of his B Minor Mass (recycling his older works being his modus operandi). At death he left unfinished his monument of musical puzzles, The Art of the Fugue, on which he had been working since 55.
Can we conclude, it is more important for a composer to see than hear?…
As we contemplate creativity, we might recall that it was on this date in 2013 that Google– Google Search, YouTube, Google Mail, and Google Drive, et al.– went down for about 5 minutes. During that brief window, internet traffic around the world dropped by 40 percent.
You must be logged in to post a comment.