After reading more and more nonsense about Rupert Murdoch “threatening” to delist News Corp’s sites from Google, it’s nice to hear the counterpoint straight from the horse’s mouth … in this case, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google…
How Google Can Help Newspapers
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574569570797550520.html
I particularly love this statement:
Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free.
That’s right – Google is your friend, old man – don’t get all jealous and threaten to hide all of your toys behind a walled garden simply because someone else is making money in a way that you don’t understand. No matter how much you and the other gigantic media conglomerates want it, the vast majority of Internet users will not pay directly for content unless they’re interested in a particular niche – something that traditional newspapers today simply cannot offer. And that’s ok because I don’t have to be a diehard traffic enthusiast to want to read updates about how freeway maintenance in the Tampa area is progressing, but I certainly wouldn’t pay for it, either.
I think ultimately the key is in managing your costs – if you can’t make as much money from online ad revenues, then you’ve got to figure out a way to reduce your overheads to keep the business afloat. Bloggers are doing it every day and some are making a reasonable living – why can’t the same practices be applied in a citizen journalism kind of approach? Sure, it’s probably a cold dose of reality to learn that you can’t keep a huge newsroom and dozens of reporters on staff to only cover a small fraction of stories, but frankly, that should be common sense anyways. Trim it down and figure out a way to continue doing what you love – providing the news – while still making a profit, and you’ll be fine.
Take a gamble by expecting the online community to pay for what it’s grown accustomed to getting for free all these years? Unless you can provide Wall Street Journal-level content to a readership that can’t live without it, you might as well just pass the baton to the next generation and let the bloggers show you how news is going to work on the Internet…