David Eun
The Google vice president who deals with print and broadcast media recently admitted that his firm cooperates with content companies, it doesn’t compete with them.
“We don’t produce or own content,” David Eun told interviewer Patrick Phillips. “What they do as a company — with journalists, news bureaus, thinking about what people want to read, producing a newspaper — that’s not what we do . . . our business model is based on connecting users with their content and bringing advertisers to their content.”
What a relief! I thought Google was ought to saddle media companies with all the costs of creating content while offering them pay-per-click ads worth just 10 percent of what they used to get from print or broadcast sales. But Eun reminds us that Google is the publisher’s friend:
“What we do is point people to where they can find content. And we make a business by putting relevant ads next to it. Our strength is in understanding what’s out there and then putting ads around it, as opposed to trying to guess what kind of content people would like and trying to sell that content ourselves.”
The full interview offers the complete win-win.
Google publishes the content that people want and puts ads around it… What a great service! And it doesn’t cost Google anything to scrape the content. GOOG will say that it brings traffic to the newspaper sites, and those sites are often running google ads. What a lovely virtuous circle. And GOOG and the newspapers see this is a great partnership? Unbelievable. Where is the win-win? Creating the content costs a lot more than Google publishing the content for free and selling cheap ads around it. It devalues the content. When will newspapers understand this? I’ve been saying this for more than 3 years… At least some newspapers are now trying to create their own ad network. I’ll say it again: if you are a newspaper or magazine don’t sign up as a Google ad partner. And don’t search engine optimize your content, optimize for your readers not the robots.