News

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”.

Google

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.”

“It is critical for us that news and news content providers remain successful,” Baker said. “The ads business, the ads tech business – the vast majority of our revenue comes from revenue shares that come from the successful sale of digital media from publishers.

Baker: "It is critical for us that news and news content providers remain successful"

Baker: “It is critical for us that news and news content providers remain successful”

“Without your success, we don’t have success, so we are clearly interested in ensuring we have an open web and we have a vested interest in ensuring that news media remains viable and profitable, and that news content remains a consistent part of the digital consumers diet.”

Baker’s comments, delivered at the NewsMediaWorks Future Forum, came after GroupM technical operations director, Tim Whitfield, likened Google to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character.

“The Terminator is a machine and it is relentless and it will not stop until you are dead,” he said. “That is basically Google.”

Whitfield: Google is basically "The Terminator -a machine and it is relentless and it will not stop until you are dead"

Whitfield: Google is basically “The Terminator -a machine and it is relentless and it will not stop until you are dead”

But Whitfield added that Google, while digital experts, does not have the content knowledge of publishers.

“They don’t have what you guys have,” he said. “In the words of Sir Walter Whitham, better to go out with a bang than a fizzle, so keep punching.”

Baker admitted that Google “has not always been very successful” in helping media firms get the most out of its partnerships with the tech behemoth, acknowledging it sometimes operated in silos.

“I was previously a client of Google and was perpetually frustrated by the fact that the organisation was so siloed,” he said. “I’d talk to my account rep about one product [but] they didn’t know anything about the next product. They couldn’t actually help me solve business problems.”

That has now improved, Baker said, with Google moving away from a “product-centric point of view to more of a solutions centric point of view”.

Will Lewis

Lewis: “Let’s see if the theft of journalism stops”

Earlier, Dow Jones CEO, Will Lewis, accused technology firms of “munching up most of the advertising” and of being reluctant to offer “clear subscription pathways for content creators”.

“Put bluntly, they milk profit from the content created by others,” he said.

But Lewis added that “some of our friends in Silicon Valley” are starting to understand the concerns of publishers “as I would hope they are after the battering Robert Thompson has given them on behalf of all of us”.

“The signs are that companies like Apple are listening. Let’s see if the theft of journalism stops,” Lewis said.

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