Google boss warns newspapers not to pi** readers off

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 8 Apr 2009 at 08:50

The search company has come under sustained attack from newspaper groups over the past week, with luminaries such as Rupert Murdoch accusing Google of "stealing" their content without due recompense.

However, speaking at the Newspaper Association of America's (NAA) annual conference, the Google chief warned that the newspapers could be shooting themselves in the foot.

"I would encourage everybody to think in terms of what your reader wants," Schmidt said, according to a report on the BBC. "These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you pi** off enough of them, you will not have any more."

Schmidt said he felt that Google's use of newspaper content represented a "fair use" of the material. "From our perspective there is always a tension around fair use and fair use is a balance of interest in favour of the consumer," he said.

He also praised the way newspapers initially embraced the internet, but suggested they had failed to push forward. "You guys did a superb job, and the act after that is a harder question," the Google boss said.

Quid pro quo

The Google boss's comments come on the same day as the company's intellectual property counsel issued a staunch defence of the search giant's conduct towards newspapers.

"Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month," Alexander Macgillivray wrote on the Google Public Policy Blog. "These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international - day and night.

"And once a reader is on the newspaper's site, we work hard to help them earn revenue. Our AdSense program pays out millions of dollars to newspapers that place ads on their sites, and our goal is that our interest-based advertising technology will help newspapers make more from each click we send them by serving better, more relevant ads to their readers to generate higher returns."

Macgillivray also denied the accusation that readers don't go any further than Google News after they've read the headlines and summary of the story. "In all cases, for news articles we've crawled and indexed but do not host, we show users just enough to make them want to read more - the headline, a "snippet" of a line or two of text and a link back to to the news publisher's website."

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