Note to Newspapers: Just Monetize Google Visitors and Stop Whining

Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton has been bitten by a vampire. He claims that Google (GOOG) is the “digital vampire” that has been “sucking the blood” out of the newspaper industry.

I totally agree!

Hinton must have been bitten by a vampire. How else do you explain such nonsense coming from the man responsible for one of the largest publishing companies–and owners of The Wall Street Journal.

He continues his deluded rhetoric:

[Google] didn’t actually begin life in a cave as a digital vampire per se. The charitable view of Google is that the news business itself fed Google’s taste for this kind of blood.”

By offering its content free on the Web, the newspaper industry “gave Google’s fangs a great place to bite,” he continued. “We will never know what might have happened had newspapers taken a different approach.”

I tell you what would have happened. Without Google sending millions of daily visitors to newspaper web sites–for FREE–the newspaper industry would have being snuggling up to the Dodo a long time ago. It drives me batty (pun intended) when I read about newspaper execs blaming their demise on Google. They seem to believe that the newspaper industry would still be thriving, if it weren’t for the search engine making it easy to serve up their content.

Let’s think about that, shall we? As a publisher, you’re placing your content on your web site, right? If you didn’t want your online content to cannibalize your printed daily offering, why post it to the web? Oh, I see. You have to, because that’s where people prefer to get their news these days. OK, you want people to find your news story and not your rivals’ right? How are you going to do that? Hmm, seems like there’s one channel that hundreds of millions of people use to find new content each day? Do you remember the name of that place? Ah, yes, Google!

OK, you get my point, so I’ll stop the sarcasm and get back to the facts.

People want to read news online. They don’t want to pay for it. They use Google. Google sends you the bulk of your daily web site visitors. Either figure out how to monetize those visitors–like the rest of the world–or block Google via your robots.txt file and shut up!

Comments

[Bobby Rifle:]

>Without Google sending millions of daily visitors to newspaper web sites–for FREE–the newspaper industry would have being snuggling up to the Dodo a long time ago.

Mm-hmm. And pray, what is the breakdown between print and online revenues?

I'll think you'll find the increase in online revenue is not covering the decline of print revenue. And even then, it's still roughly an 80-20 split in favor of print.

Fair enough, everybody (and that includes advertisers) is still blindly groping to figure out what the value of online eyeballs is. But to suggest that Google has prevented the death of newspapers from happening already is simply ludicrous.

Jun 25 09:21 PM

[racingman28:]

I like your sarcasm. Especially "Either figure out how to monetize those visitors". Maybe they should talk to the fed chief they seem to have this print thing down pretty good.

Jun 26 10:03 AM

[inversearch:]

I had a few paper routes when I was young. Wondering if there might be something in newspapers (which should be newssites) charging like they used to for subscriptions. Circa 1975 it was $4.60 a month for Daily and Sunday. Isn't the only reason people would "Google" news is because they don't already know where to find it? That said, and to the people that can't find it, if you flick through the channels on your TV set I'd bet quite a bit you're going to hear about Michael Jackson (God rest his soul) on every channel, at least at some point. Google isn't feeding the TV stations.

Jun 26 10:32 AM

[SJD:]

The article is right on the button. The blacksmiths said the same thing as the Model As were cruising by.

Jun 26 10:44 AM