> News websites are terrible, and it's their own fault.
To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play.
> make sure the fund is actually funding journalism
I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me.
Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial process?
The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast have traditionally had very strong commission based internal sales operations. They have the people to go out, get advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or retarget this staff for the new market place.
Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.
Advertisers have wanted moving ads since the dawn of the internet, and I'd be shocked if they weren't always willing to pay more to get them. But the big selling point of Google, and one of the drivers that got them to where they are today, is they looked at that money and said "no, it isn't worth it, this will compromise the user experience". Then they went with text ads on Google search.
Over the years I assume they've changed that decision along with the general cultural rot that comes to large companies, but there is a clear precedent. Publishers didn't have to take money to make their own product worse. They could have made their product good and tried to make money that way.
Although realistically these media companies are probably going to go out of business with the current model whatever they try. The internet has made a mockery of their credibility; the future seems to be podcasters with dedicated audiences going it alone or blogs - the costs are lower and the quality is generally higher.
Sure they did. They created page and site metrics that then tied to search engine placement. All the "garbage" is an effort to improve their "performance" within these specific metric categories. It's the same story with "AMP." Publishers had zero incentive to create AMP versions of their site, but they did anyways, because they saw that they lost placement if they didn't comply.
I'm not "blaming" Google, nor should you be "defending" them. What I'm attempting to do here is show that they definitely, perhaps indirectly, played a significant part in the shape of the modern web. While simultaneously decrying the laziness of publishers that led them to this late stage outcome.
I mean.. did you want to discuss how things might improve, or did you just want to score points?
It was definitely not. AMP was mostly a standard for how you should build performant websites. Then you could opt into what was effectively google caching and serving your AMP-enabled webpages for you. This is good actually.
AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers.
You're crafting a false narrative of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave by someone else, when that is not even remotely true. They've been cost cutting and compromising themselves way before some evil tech corporation came to them.
There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.
> AMP was deliberately created to mitigate the horrible website experience of news publishers.
That was very generous of the billion dollar corporation to do. I'm sure there was no self serving motivation behind it.
> of poor news media being forced to dig their own grave
You seem to be struggling to see this outside of a black and white narrative and are mistaking your own polemic as being diametrically opposed to my point of view.
> There's really no industry that deserves this kind of history repainting less than the media moguls.
You also seem to be unaware of just how many small and medium sized broadcasters and publishers there are or how large this industry actually is. You are interested in narratives, I'm interested in facts. I don't think there's much more to discuss between us.
To be fair they were just playing the game Google asked them to play.
> make sure the fund is actually funding journalism
I don't think you can do that. Journalism is publishing articles, sure, but it's also doing research, arranging interviews, travelling to get documents, it's a lot of street work, and a lot of it needs to be paid up front. How a fund can manage this relationship correctly based on view counts is beyond me.
Let alone.. do we want "clicks" to substitute for editorial process?
The deeply sad part about all of this is News and Broadcast have traditionally had very strong commission based internal sales operations. They have the people to go out, get advertisers, take their money, and then just /inline/ all the advertisements. They spent decades refusing to retrain or retarget this staff for the new market place.
Out of all industries that _didn't_ have to make a deal with Google Ads, it was theirs, and they just completely blew it.