Sam Zell Must Not Be Very Bright
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Sam Zell, but he’s a billionaire real estate developer who is buying the Chicago Tribune and the Tribune Co. media empire for $8.2 billion. You’d think with all those dollars in his pocket he might have a little sense in his head, but it doesn’t look like this is the case.
Zell gave a speech at Stanford last month, and according to CNET News.com he asked some reporters “If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” He then quickly answered himself: “Not very.” Is that so?
By my reckoning, Google makes exactly $0 from Google News. There are no ads on that section of the search site, never has been, so the company is making nothing from indexing the news. Sure, you could make the argument that Google makes some money indirectly from people who look at Google News and then flip over to another section that does have ads, but that’s a pretty flimsy case.
This whole idea that Google is “stealing” content from newspapers and other online publishers continues to astound me. If newspapers were really concerned about Google, or any other search engine, “stealing” their content, there is a very simple fix they can use called the robots.txt file. With a couple lines of code, they can tell the search spiders not to index their stories and viola no more “stealing.”
You might wonder, then, why these newspapers don’t just do that? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that about 25% of their traffic comes from Google and other search engines. So how profitable would newspapers be if Google stopped indexing the news? Not very.
No Comments
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
