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Google: friend or foe for news publishers?

Late into last Wednesday evening the debate raged, perhaps even more fiercely than usual, in the cosy room at the top of London’s Frontline Club. For a packed crowd – many established regulars, alongside a healthy handful of new faces – the night’s topic was of particular interest: “Google: friend or foe for news publishers?”

The Frontline Club’s events rarely disappoint, and this was no exception. Chaired by BBC media correspondent Torin Douglas, the panel included a host of media figures with some expertise on the subject, particularly Peter Barron, Head of PR and Communications for Google (and a former editor of Newsnight, among other journalistic achievements).

It was Barron that provided the first bold claim of the evening. “Unequivocally, Google is the friend of the newspaper publishers,” he said. “Our aim is to work with publishers, not against them.”

In a response to Peter Murdoch’s claims that Google ‘steals content’, Barron responded: “Do we steal content? Absolutely we do not… [Google News] sends a billion clicks a month to the news websites, globally.” In financial terms, he claimed, this shared revenue is worth “over $5billion a year”.

Patrick Barwise of London Business School pulled no punches with his opening statement, claiming Google is a “Good thing for consumers. Good thing for advertisers. Bad thing for media companies.” The reason he gave was that “the Google model is to make a lot of revenue from very happy advertisers, and then put very little into content.”

Content became something of a buzzword for the subsequent debate. The panel member who most vociferously, and perhaps most successfully, argued the importance of content was Matt Kelly, Digital Content Director for Mirror Group Newspapers. “We weren’t that impressed by the audience that we got via search engines,” Kelly said, explaining the reason behind the Mirror Group’s content-led approach to their new online offerings. “We would much rather get an audience that cared about the content we were producing, and didn’t just stumble on it on Google, and then buzz off back to Google. That’s Google’s audience. We want our audience.”

This focus on quality content that engages readers, he said, was key in monetising the Mirror Group’s content online. “We can’t successfully leverage a disengaged audience, but we can very successfully leverage an engaged audience – the same way we’ve been levering that audience in print for 103 years now.”

Although often revisiting ground all too well-trodden in discussions of this hot topic – in particular the economic difference in production costs between print and online – the panelists hit on some particularly sharp insights into the economics of online news.

“The Guardian this year is probably going to make £40million…in terms of online revenues,” said Robert Andrews of Paid Content. This was echoed by Peter Kirwan, columnist for Wired and Media Guardian.

“The rhetoric is starting to get slightly tired, of exchanging print dollars for digital dimes. We need to move on from that a little bit, because I think the possibility of a digital-only existence is starting to open up”.

Kelly, a continued spark in the discussion, insisted the newspapers shouldn’t be passing off the blame. “I haven’t got a problem with Google,” he said. “I’ve got a problem with the newspaper industry and how negligent we’ve all been for the last 10 years.” He did say that Google has had a negative effect, however, in the “erosion of engagement” that it brought.

He told of newspapers changing their content to desperately add hits, diluting quality to “grab” for “transcient readers”. He even went so far to describe this relentless hit hunting as a “kind of sickness that has pervaded the newspaper industry – this obsession with getting cheap traffic at any means.” He claimed that the Mirror would rather have one hit through a recommendation on Twitter than a hundred from Google searches.

The economics support his approach, he said, revealing that Mirror Football produces as much revenue as the main Mirror website, despite having a third of the readership. He attributes this to a longer time spent on each article by each user.

“A lot of people transpose the Internet and Google,” said Barron. Kelly agreed - in a particularly potent metaphor, he spoke of the Internet being like London. “We are the content,” he said. “Google is the tube system.”

The ripple of laughter at this remark seemed to express a release of tension amongst the gripped crowd, who themselves provided lively interjections into the debate, particularly about the intricacies of online – although an audience member’s praise of the ‘longtail’ effect (maintained web hits over a long period of time) was shot down.” The longtail is massively overhyped,” said Andrews.

Soon the conversation moved away from Google and fixated on the ultimate question; the money. Google or no Google, how is news on the web to be paid for?

Regarding the contentious and centric issue of The Times’ paywall, however, there were little concrete answers to be found. “”They [The Guardian, who have publically derided Murdoch’s paywall, and The Times] could both be right, they could both be wrong,” said Andrews, with a shrug.

Generally though, the answers were cynical, although most fell short of complete damnation. “We all know they are going to lose a lot of their readers – the majority,” he said, before acknowledging that didn’t necessarily spell failure, if it is ultimately a more viable business model.

When speaking of the Mirror’s websites Kelly admitted, somewhat revealingly, that “maybe” their readers would eventually “value it so much they will pay for it.”

Somewhat expectedly, Barron gave no comment when asked about Google’s rumoured ongoing development of an online news payment system, although he denied that Google’s search-based business model inherently favours free news content. Google, he said, are “objective” regarding Murdoch’s paywall experiment.

Perhaps the most interesting thought of the evening came soon after. “The most interesting question is,” Kelly mused, “what is Murdoch’s plan B?”

That was the question on everybody’s lips, yet ultimately, that was the question to which nobody had the answer.

Watch the full video of the event

Tags: google, industry, media, news, newspapers, publishers,

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