Google branded ‘relentless machine that will not stop until you are dead’
Google has insisted the continuing success of the publishing industry is critical to its own well-being, after the corporation was described as a “relentless terminator that will not stop until you are dead”.
Banks Baker, the search giant’s head of global partnerships, product solutions and innovation, claimed Google and media firms are “well aligned, at least philosophically”.
He said search is “highly reliant” on an open web that has lots of news content that consumers can read through.”
Translation: Without your content we are screwed, because we certainly aren’t going to fork out money to produce anything ourselves.
Except Michael, they do. Google pumps a lot of money into independent news sources, precisely because it needs them to aggregate over for its news feeds.
https://www.digitalnewsinitiative.com/
what a dumb comment from groupm
Publishers have themselves to blame. As The Guardian has demonstrated, the assumption that feeding Google and FB would bring revenue through traffic was stupid. All it has done is make the aggregators stronger. Now they are taking virtually all of the revenue. It’s like the Walking Dead. Except in this case the news media are the zombies.
GroupM pines for a world where their revenue model wasn’t complicated by transparency. FB and Google has all but obliterated any opportunity at arbitrage which has been the foundation of GroupM’s empire since inception. To compensate we’ve seen all sorts of fanciful attempts at restoring margin via dodgy deals and kickbacks with no concern for the client. Sorrell’s missive earlier this month about clients over investing in walled gardens is merely the start of a campaign to move $ to media channels that are profitable for groupm. Anywhere but FB and Google is the mantra, and as usual, the local folk are falling in line. Maybe a new business model might be worth a look ?