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.”
“Business is the ordinary means of living for nearly all of us,” P.T. Barnum wrote in his 1865 book The Humbugs of the World: An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits and Deceivers Generally, in All Ages. “ ‘There’s cheating in all trades but ours,’ is the prompt reply from the bootmaker with his brown paper soles, the grocer with his floury sugar and chicoried coffee…the newspaper man with his ‘immense circulation,’ the publisher with his ‘Great American Novel,’ the city auctioneer with his ‘Pictures by the Old Masters’—all and everyone protest each his own innocence, and warn you against the deceits of the rest.”
But…
The greatest humbug of all is the man who believes—or pretends to believe—that everything and everybody are humbugs. If you can imagine a hog’s mind in a man’s body—sensual, greedy, selfish, cruel, cunning, sly, coarse, yet stupid, shortsighted, unreasoning, unable to comprehend anything except what concerns the flesh, you have your man. He thinks himself philosophic and practical, a man of the world; he thinks to show knowledge and wisdom, penetration, deep acquaintance with men and things. Poor fellow! he has exposed his own nakedness. Instead of showing that others are rotten inside, he has proved that he is. He claims that it is not safe to believe others—it is perfectly safe to disbelieve him. He claims that every man will get the better of you if possible—let him alone! Selfishness, he says, is the universal rule—leave nothing to depend on his generosity or honor; trust him just as far as you can sling an elephant by the tail. A bad world, he sneers, full of deceit and nastiness—it is his own foul breath that he smells; only a thoroughly corrupt heart could suggest such vile thoughts. He sees only what suits him, as a turkey buzzard spies only carrion, though amid the loveliest landscape. I pronounce him who thus virtually slanders his father and dishonors his mother, and defiles the sanctities of home, and the glory of patriotism, and the merchant’s honor, and the martyr’s grave, and the saint’s crown—who does not even know that every sham shows that there is a reality, and that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue—I pronounce him—no, I do not pronounce him a humbug, the word does not apply to him. He is a fool…
As we honor honesty, we might send licentious birthday greetings to Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac; he was born on this date in 1619. While he was a bold and innovative author in the 17th century libertine literary tradition, he is better remembered as the title character he inspired in Edmond Rostand’s noted drama Cyrano de Bergerac, which, although it includes elements of the real Cyrano’s life, is larded with invention and myth.
Cyrano was possessed of a prodigious proboscis, over which he is said to have fought more than 1,000 duels. Surely as importantly, his writings, which mixed science and romance, influenced Jonathan Swift, Edgar Alan Poe, Voltaire– and Moliere, who “borrowed freely” from Cyrano’s 1654 comedy Le Pédant joué (The Pedant Tricked).
You must be logged in to post a comment.