Newspaper publisher Fairfax used the business pages of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday to raise the profile of the challenge Google resents to newspaper publishers and other traditional (older) advertising mediums. While the article starts out presenting a balanced view of the Google challenge, it occasionally takes a reds under the bed approach in making a case against Google – by fanning fear about its size and unknowns about its internal workings.
The article is relevant to newsagents in that it brings into focus the concerns of newspaper publishers with the expanding Google take of advertising revenue here in Australia.
It’s interesting how this idea is snowballing since Murdoch started speaking about it a month or so ago.
Is it just me, or does Fairfax appear to be panicking here?
Bill It comes across that way. Rupert Murdoch annunced to the world his pay for news plans, Fairfax follows. It will be interesting to see how this plays out from a publisher perspective and also from the perspective of retailers who rely on newspapers fopr traffic.
Bill,
Definitely looks like they’re in panic mode. It’s the thinking of old-media. They hate/fear something because they can’t control it.
Google is so big because their users make it so. Google is as much controlled by their users as their users are by it.
Old media is going to have a very difficult time painting Google as the untrustworthy omniscient voice of the internet when its internal workings are far more transparent than their own. Indeed Google’s internal workings, policies and philosophies are rather well documented and publicised.
Old media is trying to create fear about the unknown. That kind of tactic isn’t going to work in the age of information. This old-world strategy clearly underlines how very fucked Fairfax is they continue down their current path.