News Corp boss raises alarm about Google’s voice plans for news
The boss of News Corp Australia has warned that Google is set to snatch listeners from the radio and podcast industry in the same way it has disrupted the world of publishing.
Writing in The Australian today, News Corp’s executive chairman, Michael Miller, suggested Google’s plans to create a spoken news service could cripple the radio industry and stunt the growth of publishers’ attempts to break into podcasting and other audio services. He claimed participants are being pressured to join the audio Google News service but said Google is declining to pay for the content at this stage.
“Google has resisted approaches from publishers to work out some form of fair commercial agreement in advance of launching its audio news service,” Miller wrote. “It says it wants to achieve ‘scale’ first.”
The search engine giant launched a prototype of the artificial intelligence driven voice news service in December after a year of working with publishers including The Associated Press, Hollywood Reporter, and the South China Morning Post.
Australian media companies have been slow to roll out services on Google Voice however some brands, such as Officeworks, have been experimenting with the platform.
Local broadcasters have been more enthusiastic about Amazon’s rival voice product, Alexa, with Commercial Radio Australia launching a rebroadcasting app for the service at last year’s Radio Alive conference. Southern Cross Austereo last year announced it would push out Hit and Triple M programs on the Amazon platform.
News Corp’s Michael Miller: “Google intends to profit off the creativity and industry of journalists and media businesses without paying for the privilege”
Google declined to comment about Miller’s article while Commercial Radio Australia had not been able to reply at the time of publication.
News Corp was absent from Google’s original list of industry collaborators, which also included the NY Times, NBC and The Washington Post, with Miller claiming the publishers in the pilot have been pressured by Google to participate in the program.
“Publishers are being asked to breakdown podcasts, audio news briefings and radio broadcasts into ‘single topic stories’ that Google’s algorithm can reorganise into a personalised newsfeed for individual users based on their interests,” Miller wrote.
“That may sound innocuous at first, but in reality, it’s a way for Google to drive consumers from publishers’ websites and radio stations, and keep them in the Google ecosystem.
“In other words, Google intends to profit off the creativity and industry of journalists and media businesses without paying for the privilege.”
Millar cited BuzzFeed’s current financial problems as an example of the dangers for publishers collaborating too closely with digital platforms such Google and Facebook.
He wrote: “Even newish digital darlings like BuzzFeed – once thought to be a news model for modern times — are learning fast the pain Google (and Facebook) can cause through their dominance of how information is distributed, and how dependent publishers are on the whims of the tech giants’ algorithms.”
He added: “But this is something that should concern all businesses and consumers, not just media. Where a company such as Google has incredible power, its approach is to take, not give back or share. That is hardly a role model for how business relationships should work.”
Mumbrella’s Audioland conference on May 2 will explore the rich ecosystem of the audio industry including content creation, distribution, marketing, industry trends, new technology and more. Early bird tickets are available now.
I have a Google Home Hub and Google Home Mini. They are great to control my smartlights and listen to songs from Google Play Music or radio stations from TuneIn. Aside from that I find them absolutely useless, and whenever I try to ask it more than the most simple things it cannot understand what I want.
Is that because Australia is crap in its adoption of these, or the devices and ecosystem itself is crap?
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Radio must do itself justice. Radio is not simply a voice on the airways, it is a gigantic art form with endless possibilities, and perhaps the last bastion of real mass communication.
The death of radio (should it happen and should we live to see it) will be caused by the lack of attention to the basic art or creativity and human communication, as these are radio’s two granite foundations.
Simple ad’ spruiking, so-called “celebrity” self-promotion and banal chattering have taken the lead in recent years, and the result has been to choke true strength of good radio.
Was it a biblical story that warned about the house built on Sandyland?
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Gees Josh, you’re one might switched-on hombre.
I control my lights, music, radio, TV etc. with my right index fingers. Works just fine for me.
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Like Harvey Norman, publishers and broadcasters have all had plenty of time to get used to and plan ahead for digital disruption.
If you can’t compete with new tech firms entering your market, then maybe you shouldn’t be running your company and let someone else do the job for you.
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Ultimately at the end of the day, if you want quality journalism as a consumer you better be willing to pay for it.
The ad revenue model has led the entire culture to expect news/content for free and quality has been clearly suffering as a result.
BuzzFeed went down the click bait route same as everyone and now have only themselves to blame for their decline in business.
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“Australian media companies have been slow to roll out services on Google Voice” – I would disagree here.
Southern Cross Austereo, Macquarie, ABC, Sky News, Fox Sports AND all Newscorp publications have submitted news feeds to the Google Home and most of those have been active for more than a year.
Open the Google Home app on your mobile phone and navigate to ‘More Settings’ from the menu. Navigate to the ‘Services’ section on the settings page and tap the ‘News’ button for the full list.
Voice agency Versa recently conducted a survey of 2000 Australians which showed that the Google Home is far more popular than the Alexa in Australia with 12% in homes versus 2%.
I can see how this new proposed aggregated approach to the Google Home news service would be concerning for publishers. Currently a user selects their preferred news provider when asking “play me the news”.
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So how do you explain the many years of quality journalism that ad revenue has already provided?
Revenue is revenue, the journalism on many paid news programs stinks and is getting worser and werserer, like totally.
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I smell another antitrust suit here and it is quite serious, no doubt in my mind that Google is slowly losing it’s original intention of being a “good company”. The only way I can see this working is that the algorithm is transparent and controlled by the user. Furthermore, how can they justify demanding a payment from anybody who wants to broadcast within this framework, it may work for small distributions with niche markets, but it’s not going to sound very fair if they pretty much monopolize the market. Even if there are a few competitors it’s not going to make sense that the news organizations should be paying and thus subservient to google, making the news potentially biased even if the algorithm was transparent. Shoppers Drug Mart is a pharmacy that stopped distributing the magazine “MIT Technology Review” due to an article that made the company look bad. I would not be happy if news publishers were put under additional control due to fees or requirements created by a new company that are not already found in TV or Radio. Even if Google woke up to the seriousness of this expansion and modeled it as telecommunications companies operate – it’s still a huge undertaking and would make their corporate mission statement too diverse to accept. A company should have a simple and clear goal or direction, all of it’s actions will fall under this mission or one would think they were becoming too big or managing to monopolize their advantageous position unfairly.
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I am obviously too dumb and am missing something but why not simply say NO to Google?
Seriously, other media owners get naff all out of Google and arguably get royally shafted on so many of their dealings. Just vote with your feet!
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