Google Offers a Digital Olive Branch July 1
July 1, 2009
In my Google: The Digital Gutenberg, I describe an invention disclosed in a Google patent document for a “partner” to use Google like an integrated motion picture studio. The invention, in effect, allows a partner to create content, post it, control access to the content, run an ad campaign using Google tools, and essential operate like those fun loving moguls Sammy (I am a lamb) Goldwyn and Louis (I am a cupcake) Mayer. Google, according to Reuters, is promoting this “run your own business” service to newspapers. You can read Joseph Tartakoff’s “Google Wants Newspaper to Post Their Videos to YouTube” to get the Thomson Reuters’ slant on this story. For me, the most intriguing comment was:
That [the new offer from Google] contrasts with Google News, where publishers do not get a cut of any of the revenue from the ads that are placed around their headlines. Still, it’s unlikely that many publishers will want to abandon other video platforms, like Brightcove, which also allow them to sell their own ads against their video content—and to link up with several ad networks. Google had already begun to slowly integrate YouTube news videos with Google News last month, when it added videos for the first time to Google News, and the new push should further that. For Google, it’s also a free way to add more professional content to YouTube, and thus attract more premium advertisers.
Will newspapers grab the digital olive branch? Good question. I think that some publishers may do the math and conclude that Google has tipped the odds in favor of the house. I think that’s a wrong way to look at the Google offer, but that’s why I am a fat, addled goose, paddling in the pond with mine drainage run off. I don’t sit in an office tower with air conditioning cooling my pin feathers.
Stephen Arnold, July 1, 2009
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