Top execs reveal why newspapers don't block Google

vTo hear the poobahs of traditional media tell it, Google is to print media what global warming is to the polar caps. At many once-stalwart print publications, profits are melting away.

For several months, leaders at some of the nation's most influential newspapers and periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and the online arm of Forbes magazine have begun blaming Google and similar Web services for at least some of their deepening financial troubles. Google sells ads tied to the news blurbs it "scrapes" from news sites. It links back to the Web sites from which it acquired the content but doesn't share ad revenue with them. This isn't fair, many media execs say.

In all the very public bashing of Google, however, few if any of the critics has answered why they don't just cut Google out of the equation by preventing the search engine from indexing their Web pages. The task could be accomplished by inserting a single line of code into their URLs. If Forbes.com added a line such as forbes.com/robots.txt, content from the site would be rendered invisible to Google.

Representatives from the Journal and AP declined to comment for this story, but their Web sites speak volumes for them. None of the companies has severed ties with Google and risked losing access to the search engine's millions of users. Traditional print publications, which have seen ad revenue plummet, mass layoffs, and in some cases the shut down of operations, are now hopelessly dependent on Google to lure readers, says media executives. Jim Brady, the Washington Post's former digital chief, says the question of whether Google is good or bad for print journalism is almost irrelevant at this point. Print publications are helpless to do anything about it.

"Get out a sheet of paper and write down all the things Google does for you," said Brady, former executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, as he offered advice to his former peers in old media. "Google allows your content to be exposed to people who would never see it otherwise. If you're able to code your pages well, then you can get an awful lot of leads from Google. It's up to your site to turn those leads into loyal customers...Google is not going away."

Pointing fingers
That's not exactly how Jim Spanfeller sees it. The CEO of Forbes.com asked the question in an opinion piece he wrote for the blog PaidContent.com, "is Google being disproportionally compensated for what is fundamentally other people's work?" He said the answer appears to be yes. He claimed Google "makes roughly $60 million a year directing folks" to Forbes.com.

So why doesn't Spanfeller prevent the search engine from indexing the magazine's content?

"I don't know that this isn't a bad idea," Spanfeller said in a phone interview with CNET News. "But I think that would be hard to do without everyone's competitors shutting (Google) out as well."

This sounds like an acknowledgment that Forbes needs Google to compete and that the search engine may provide publications like his a valuable service. That's at least what Marissa Mayer, a Google exec, told Congress on Wednesday during a hearing on the future of journalism. Google sends 1 billion page views every month to print publications, Mayer testified during the hearing.

Spanfeller argues, however, that Google does do harm. For example, the blurbs the search engine obtains from news sites often includes enough information to satisfy the major questions about a story. For many people, reading a headline and synopsis about three more people dying of swine flu in Mexico is all some readers want to know. There's little motivation to click on links to the site that actually produced the news. To some in media, this violates copyright law.

Spanfeller says there's also frustration when a news organization pays professional journalists to do original reporting and then see links to stories written by amateurs--or worse, blogs that are little more than flimsy rewrites of their content--with higher visibility on Google than their own.

Spanfeller wants Google to do a better job of showcasing professionally created content, and "cease stepping on or over the line of fair use." This means he wants Google to start providing less information in its news blurbs and crack down on sites that use stories without authorization.

"We show users just enough to make them want to read more," wrote Alexander Macgillivray, Google's associate general counsel, wrote last month. "Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rights holder...to remove their content from our index."

The cure?
So what do print execs want from Google? First, the search engine could cure a lot of ills by sharing ad revenue with print companies. After all, it's their content Google is selling ads against. Forget it, not going to happen predicts Brady.

"There was a fair amount of pushing from people at the (Washington Post) news group who said: 'We should make Google pay us for our content,' Brady said. "I told them 'They're never going to do it. They wouldn't give us a dime.' (They responded) 'Well then, we should block it.' I said 'Fine, we can go ahead and do that and that's suicidal.'

"Google built a better mousetrap than the newspapers were able to build," Brady continued. "That's part of the reason they're making the money they're making. At some point I don't know what you can do about that other than to try and work it to your advantage."

There are some media execs looking for new ways to get their content in front of readers without help from Google. Amazon on Wednesday showcased a new large-screen e-reader called the Kindle DX. The device is partly geared toward readers of newspapers, and magazines. Newspaper publishers Hearst Corp., and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. have said they will create their own e-readers designed to deliver their own content.

This kind of effort is fine with Brady. He says this kind of thinking is far more preferable than obsessing about the past.

"We have to ask, 'what's next?'" said Brady who plans to soon open his own consulting business. "That's where everybody needs to get to. Because Google isn't going away and they aren't writing us checks. Let's move on. We're all getting way too hung up on the past, with all the things we should have done 10 years ago, could have done...well, we didn't. Game over. We should be asking 'What are the new rules of this game and how do we best take advantage of them.'"

[the article was originally published at http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10235359-93.html]

Printerstitial - The print cousin of Interstitial

So most of those who know about online advertising have at some point of time encountered an Interstital, which is nothing but a page that loads before an expected page. This page is often used by publishers to promote an advertisment etc. From my experience, i've seen very good CTR's on Interstital ads (right upto 14%). But now there is a cousin of Interstital, the "Printerstitial".

Enter the "PrinterStitial." A Denver based startup, Format Dynamics, has invented a whole new ad category by developing a service that inserts "Ads" into printouts of Web pages, combining the "advantages of online ads with the power of traditional print ads." They've used 18 months of actual "PrinterStitial" results from early publisher adopters, combined with data from market researcher MetaFacts, Format Dynamics estimates that U.S. consumers print approx. 61 billion Web pages annually...creating what the company's CEO Ethan Holien calls a previously "untapped market opportunity, with scale and legs".

72 newspapers of the MediaNews Group, including The Denver Post, as well as Rand McNally, The Houston Chronicle, CNET, Career Builder, and the Orange County Register are currently using Printerstitials.

When consumers take printouts of Web pages enabled with Format Dynamics' "CleanPrint," the technology dynamically reformats the page(s) to be more appealing to the user , while completely eliminating such Web-centric features as navigation bars etc. The PrinterStitials can either be print-friendly versions of ads or completely separate "print ads".

Depending on the online publisher, P'stitials are either sold by the sites themselves or by Format Dynamics, Holien said. The company is talking to vertical ad networks, as well as "advertisers and agencies when appropriate." Travel Ad Network is already on board. Ad revenues are shared between Format Dynamics and publishers.

In their media kit, the Orange County Register and ocregister.com stress how engaged users are with pages they print out. "When users print online content, it's because they intend to read again, hold onto or pass along the information on the page," the kit advises. "Now your ad can appear on those hard copies, giving you the opportunity to create a lasting brand association and an incentive to win their business." The paper's stated ad rate for PrinterStitials is $1,300 monthly.

While PrinterStitial sales are targeted towards the digital buying community, Holien noted that publishers already "versed with print," can sell existing print advertisers. The pitch - "This is print advertising, but you can target it three ways (behaviorally, contextually, geographical). You don't have to buy just a circulation number."

The company has developed a companion analytical tool, PrintTracker, which measures all printing of PrinterStitial ads directly from browsers, providing publishers and advertisers with relevant data and metrics. Previous printing data only measured the minority of pages printed from "printer-friendly" buttons, Holien said. "Most publishers right now don't understand how much printing is occurring," he added.

"It's new inventory that publishers can monetize, and an opportunity for advertisers to plug in ads, We know in general that people do online research and buy in local stores, and a majority of purchases have an online component," he said. Now, FormatDyamics' technology combines that empirical information "with the anecdotal info that people show up in stores with pages in hand." said analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.

Interestingly, Format Dynamics, has raised $4.4 million in first-round venture capital and in its demos states that both CleanPrint and Click4Print provide the opportunity for "truly integrated online/offline advertising."

I can forsee the loop between online and offline advertising closing very soon :).

(those who want to read the complete article can log on to Mediapost)