News publishers sure seem in a hurry to self-destruct

Sep 7, 2012 23:31 GMT  ·  By

Good businesses – that is to say businesses that survive, – when faced with a challenge, analyze it, see what they need to change and do it. Bad businesses whine. Can you guess in which category newspapers fall? Whining, along with a ton of cash and knowing the right people can work though, in the short term at least.

That's how German publishers gleefully signed their own death warrant, by pushing for a law that requires any site that links to their stories and publishes the title of that story or a small excerpt, say a search engine for example, has to pay for the privilege of sending the newspaper sites traffic.

The end result is not going to be that these sites make more money, it's going to be that no one will link to them. Google can survive without Google News and even with fewer news results in the search engine, newspaper sites can't survive without Google.

Happy to follow their neighbours towards their accelerated demise, French newspapers are now asking for the same quick death.

In their delusional version of the world, Google will start paying them money while also sending more money their way. In the real world, they'll go out of business sooner than they would have had anyway. That doesn't seem like such a bad thing, actually.

Because, while in their delusional world, people just can't survive without the hard hitting journalism newspapers think they provide, in our world, all the news publications that understand the web couldn't be any happier for getting rid of the competition.

Without big newspaper sites in the Google Search results, smaller blogs can get much better rankings and a lot more traffic and people searching for info are going to go to wherever Google tells them to, for better or for worse.