Google vs. Newspapers: What is the Real Issue? - Who Needs Whom?
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The Belgian publications will find out soon enough whether Google was giving them anything of value in return. The search engine interpreted the ruling in the case in which it was involved quite literally. Not only did it remove links to specific Belgian news sources from Google News; it also removed them from Google Belgium entirely. You can still reach the sites from other versions of Google. But their traffic may already be dropping off.
Getting search traffic doesn’t translate into remuneration in any traditional sense. But it can’t be discounted. Why do search marketers strive to increase their traffic from the search engines, after all? As Danny Sullivan put it, “It’s free, easy and converts well.”
And newspapers do get a significant amount of traffic from search engines. It varies tremendously depending on the paper, of course, and how much attention they devote to search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Some observers have said a newspaper’s website can expect to see anywhere between eight and 13 percent of its traffic arriving from the search engines. Sullivan quoted Marshal Simmons, chief search strategist for the New York Times Company as saying that “the NYT gets approximately 22% of its traffic from search engines. This number is very actively growing.”
Taking a wider view of the market, Sullivan also asked Bill Tancer at Hitwise about figures for news sites and search engine traffic. Hitwise tracks more than 3,000 sites in its News & Media – Print category. During one recent week, that category received 13.66 percent of its traffic from Google – and 22.44 percent of that category’s traffic as a whole came from the search engines. Somehow, that doesn’t sound like Google is exploiting newspapers and giving little or nothing in return, especially since many papers are struggling to find a new revenue model with huge drops in their print circulation.
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