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.”
In his invaluable newsletter, Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick unpacks the full– and forlorn— story of the online travails of Kate Middleton (AKA Catherine, the Princess of Wales) and considers its implications…
… As Charlie Warzel wrote, “It was always going to end this way. The truth about Kate Middleton’s absence is far less funny, whimsical, or salacious than the endless memes and conspiracy theories suggested.” But this also wasn’t a simple case of the unruly masses being Bad Online.
Yes, the #WhereIsKate hashtag was initially spread by the Sussex Squad, a royal fandom subculture that hates Prince William and believes Kate is, at best, sort of racist. And a lot of the early gossip was motivated by an impulse to give Kate a taste of what Meghan Markle is still experiencing at the hands of the UK media. But if you’re looking for someone to blame all of this on, it’s clearly Kate’s press team and, by extension, everyone in her life that supposedly cares about her. There were countless moments where her press team could have squashed all this, but they didn’t. Instead, they let a woman who had just discovered she has cancer become a global laughing stock and, at one point, made her apologize for it! Absolute sicko shit.
But this is also just how our various institutions work — or more accurately do not work — now. Over the last 25 years we have slowly uploaded every part of our lives to a system of platforms run by algorithms that make money off our worst impulses. Well, the ones brands are comfortable advertising around. And for years we have wondered what the world might look like when we crossed the threshold into a fully online world. Well, we did. We crossed it. This is what it looks like. And it is already too vast and complicated and all-encompassing to blame any one individual for how it functions. If we want something new, we’d have to smash the whole thing and I don’t think that’s going to happen. So let’s hope PR people, at the very least, can figure out how to deal with it going forward…
Those of us in post-colonial North America, might ponder the implications of this sad tale for matters closer to home– public health, meme stocks, and perhaps especially our looming elections…
As we lean back and think, we might recall that it was on this date in 1881 that a celebrated hoaxster 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.”
On Friday morning, January 25, 2013, 15 jihadis entered the restoration and conservation rooms on the ground floor of the Ahmed Baba Institute in Sankoré, a government library in Mali. The men swept 4,202 manuscripts off lab tables and shelves and carried them into the tiled courtyard. They doused the manuscripts—including 14th- and 15th-century works of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, their fragile pages covered with algebraic formulas, charts of the heavens, and molecular diagrams—in gasoline. Then they tossed in a lit match. The brittle pages and their dry leather covers ignited in a flash.
In minutes, the work of Timbuktu’s greatest savants and scientists, preserved for centuries, hidden from the 19th-century jihadis and French conquerors, survivors of floods, bacteria, water, and insects, were consumed by the inferno.
In the capital city of Bamako 800 miles away, the founder of Timbuktu’s Mamma Haidara Library, a scholar and community leader named Abdel Kader Haidara, saw the burning of the manuscripts as a tragedy—and a vindication of a remarkable plan he’d undertaken. Starting with no money besides the meager sum in his savings account, the librarian had recruited a loyal circle of volunteers, badgered and shamed the international community into funding the scheme, raised $1 million, and hired hundreds of amateur smugglers in Timbuktu and beyond. Their goal? Save books…
As we check it out, we might wish a spectacularly happy birthday to Phineas Taylor (“P.T.”) Barnum; he was born on this date in 1810. Barnum founded and ran a small business, then a weekly newspaper in his native Connecticut before leaving for New York City and the entertainment business. He parlayed a variety troop and a “curiosities” museum (featuring the ‘”Feejee” mermaid’ and “General Tom Thumb”) into a fortune… which he lost in a series of legal setbacks. He replenished his stores by touring as a temperance speaker, then served as a Connecticut State legislator and as Mayor of Bridgeport (a role in which he introduced gas lighting and founded the Bridgeport hospital)… It wasn’t until after his 60th birthday that he turned to endeavor for which he’s best remembered– the circus.
“I am a showman by profession…and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me.”
George C Ballas, Sr, the Houston, Texas, dance studio owner who changed the way America cut its grass when he invented the Weed Eater aka the weed whacker, died [late last month] of natural causes. He was 85. Ballas (seen here with an early prototype) got the idea for the mower while sitting in a car wash wondering if those spinning bristles could be modified to trim grass and weeds in areas a lawnmower couldn’t reach. Turns out they could. He founded his Weed Eater company in 1971, made a bundle, and later sold the invention to Emerson Electric for an undisclosed sum. “A Weed Eater comes along once in a lifetime,” he said. Although he’s known as the Weed King, Ballas’ life was dance. He was an Arthur Murray dance instructor and his own Dance Studio USA was the world’s largest (43,000 square feet); his wife was a noted flamenco dancer; his son Corky is a champion ballroom dancer; and his grandson Mark is a professional dancer, a regular partner on Dancing With the Stars. (AP photo)
As we dance our way under those inconvenient hedges and into those pesky corners, we might wish a spectacularly happy birthday to Phineas Taylor (“P.T.”) Barnum; he was born on this date in 1810. Barnum founded and ran a small business, then a weekly newspaper in his native Connecticut before leaving for New York City and the entertainment business. He parlayed a variety troop and a “curiosities” museum (featuring the ‘”Feejee” mermaid’ and “General Tom Thumb”) into a fortune… which he lost in a series of legal setbacks. He replenished his stores by touring as a temperance speaker, then served as a Connecticut State legislator and as Mayor of Bridgeport (a role in which he introduced gas lighting and founded the Bridgeport hospital)… It wasn’t until after his 60th birthday that he turned to endeavor for which he’s best remembered– the circus.
“I am a showman by profession…and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me.”
source: Library of Congress
source: Library of Congress
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