The newspaper industry is as excited as can be over news that Australia has passed a law “requiring” Google to pay for news links. Europe is on deck. They want in on the action.
I’ve written about this scam before. It’s coming from Rupert Murdoch, who controls the Australian media. Most of the money that Google (and Facebook) will pay for news links in Australia will go to Murdoch and his global propaganda machine, not to keeping reporters fed.
So why was Google willing to be tossed into this briar patch? Because it lets them finally monetize Google News, and more thoroughly monetize a related service, Google Now. If Murdoch is going to charge Google for links to his stuff, Google is going to get its money back.
News has been ad-free for over a decade now. It’s great. Tells you, in broad strokes, what’s going on. It lets you try to go deeper. Increasingly, not much deeper. Paywalls have become commonplace on every beat. You click a link and what you want is covered up with a demand to subscribe.
Few people this side of Larry Page can see everything because yearly subscriptions to every publication are prohibitively expensive. Most of us don’t want to read everything anyway. I wrote about it five years ago I wrote about it 12 years ago. I wrote about it 15 years ago. I've been writing it since I was a red head.
Here’s my idea. Google Pay convinces publishers to charge a per-article or per-day fee. It’s like buying the paper. This request comes up with the paywalled click, and Google passes the money to publishers (after taking a small cut). The cut then goes into delivering publishers important data about their traffic, detailed data they can use to improve their product.
The concept of “micro transactions” has been around since the 1990s. I was part of a start-up in 1999 called Queit, which was just about to get off the ground when the dot-bomb killed everybody.
At minimum, the Australian move justifies Google putting ads on News, and more ads on Google Now. It should mean more content, beyond a link, going to Google users. Providing even more for ads, or money, can become profitable monetization on both sides. It can make Google millions. It can make Google Pay billions.
