Eric Schmidt Stands Firm On Google Sharing Revenues With Some Poxy Content Producer
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, annoyed American print media at the Newspaper Association of America conference recently by saying: “Try to figure out what your consumer wants. If you piss off enough of them, you will not have any of them”. And he’s not set to charm any more of them with an interview with FT.com today.
He’s probably right when he says that people won’t pay for “common news”, but as we saw yesterday, that’s starting to become prevailing opinion anyway. It’s a jump to say that because of this, only advertising will work; people will use micropayments for specialised niche material, and subscriptions to get that common news packaged alongside lifestyle, opinion, analysis and good quality writing, from a brand they trust. And advertising will bump up revenues, but not be the core. That’s our take, anyway.
For now, Schmidt is staying away from making Google make the shift from information distributor to information creator: “We’re trying to avoid crossing the line between the infrastructure and technology that Google provides and the content that our partners provide. There is a line and we’re trying to stay on our side of it.”
He also refuses to be drawn on Google sharing search revenue with newspapers: “We’ve decided that the value we provide to the partners is the traffic. So we want to provide incredible numbers of users going to their sites, their content, which is why we urge them to make it deeper, stronger and use better tools and so forth…if we were to transfer money we would be taking money from something unrelated to newspapers and just paying them, which doesn’t seem like a good sustainable model for anybody”. Maybe that’s fair, but he also admits: “we depend on the production of very, very high-quality content”. Will Google deem the production of content financially valuable enough to try and preserve it, if new business models still prove unsustainable? Could make for some interesting manoeuvres.
While he says he won’t be buying anything else for a while, thanks to the fact that “corporations or institutions come with liabilities that we don’t want to take on”, he nevertheless expresses faith in his last liability-laden purchase YouTube, hinting at future “subscription models” being a way to monetise the meme-strewn cash vortex. Ah, so the people won’t pay for news, but they will pay for Keyboard Cat? Actually, maybe he’s right, even though that’s really quite depressing.
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | May 21, 2009 10:44AM |
