by Search Copywriter
Y. Sulaiman
Just a day after Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson suggested sites like Google were "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet", Mountain View's CEO Eric Schmidt delivered a strong speech to American journalists in which he encouraged newspapers to innovate and not to "piss off" their readers.Y. Sulaiman
In his closing speech to the Newspaper Association of America's annual meeting in San Diego yesterday, Schmidt said that he was "very impressed" with the way that newspapers had performed in the early days of the internet. However, he also stated that since then, many newspapers have been unable to follow up on this success and encouraged further developments and innovation to stay ahead of the game.
Schmidt said: "I would encourage everybody: think in terms of what your reader wants. These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more." He also added: "It's obvious to me that the majority of the circulation of a newspaper should be online, rather than printed. There should be five times, 10 times more circulation because there is no distribution cost."
Schmidt went on to discuss a range of suggestions that publications could incorporate in order to enhance their online offerings - for instance, mobile internet services and investing in new technology to create newspaper platforms that other businesses could utilise. Reportedly, he also talked about how Google could reward publishers for their information and the role of copyright.
The latter has been a sticking point for Google, and not just in the US. The search engine's infamous case with Belgian copyright group Copiepresse has spanned years, with the organisation first suing Google to get its content removed from Google News. Last month, the dispute reared its head up once again when Copiepresse's secretary-general said that it may take Google to court again if advertising was introduced on Google News in Belgium, as it has been on its US site.
The UK hasn't been without its fair share of blame portioning too. Last month, the Guardian asked the UK government to examine Google News and other content aggregators in a written response to the preliminary Digital Britain report, a plan to place Britain as a leader in the global digital economy. What's more, Observer writer Henry Porter branded Google "an amoral menace" just last weekend, claiming that "[newspapers] are being held captive and tormented by their executioner [Google], who has the gall to insist that the relationship is mutually beneficial."
Schmidt might have been addressing a US consortium of journalists yesterday, but the tactical balance of praise and encouragement in his speech is sure to have resonance worldwide. And it does seem true that Google tremendous dominance has held newspapers somewhat to ransom - Hitwise statistics for the four weeks ending April 4th show Google with 73 per cent of US search share, and 76 per cent share in the UK.
So, while newspapers can choose to block Google spiders from accessing their content using the robots.txt file, in doing so they will inevitably drive their readers towards their competitors. Ultimately, it's likely that anti-Google calls from publishers won't end until a better business model emerges and newspapers start profiting from the web with as much ferocity as Google has done to date.
