Every penny of that is the result of the labor of low-paid journalists, hanging on by their fingernails. What happens to Google’s profits when all that free high-quality content just goes away?— DaveLaFontaine (@DaveLaFontaine)
Well you see…Media orgs ignored Google and facebook right up until Google and Facebook ate their lunch (ad revenue).
Oh, and because of the internet itself, your local paper is competing with news media around the world directly.
— James Purser (@purserj)
Google would not be able to earn this much money were it not for the content provided by journalists, which definitely means that they are owed some money in exchange for providing this service. Since Google earns even more from data mining and the like, it becomes even clearer that the tech giant should ideally be giving out royalties to journalists whose articles they are linking to.
An argument against this would state that Google is bringing traffic to these sites and the publishers can earn money through this traffic, but first and foremost Google is profiting off of this arrangement because of the content that is provided by these sites so the traffic they are sending there is more or less irrelevant at this point in time. Only time will tell if Google manages to get through this scandal in one piece.
Photo: Reuters / Thomas Peter
