[simonh]

I think the point here is being missed a bit. Yes they get a lot of benefit from traffic coming from Google. The point is they want that traffic coming directly to them.

If people go to Google News they see traffic from other alternative news sources as well. These people are Google News users and sometimes see e.g. Die Welt content, but Die Welt wants them to be Die Welt users. The publishers are used to having a direct relationship with their readers, they don't want to be competing with news clips and links from budget internet news sites and blog aggregators.

What's most interesting is that they have their own Facebook pages. So these guys are choosing to use Facebook for free to promote their brand, with pictures and excerpts from their articles. The thing there is that a relationship through Facebook can be more direct. The Facebook page is really an extension of the Die Welt web site, bringing it closer to Facebook users and trying to built that relationship. There's no way to do that through Google News.

Now, I do agree they're going about their relationship with Google in a bone headed and self-harming way. However they are doing it for what appear to them to be valid reasons. That's why papers and magazines always preferred direct subscriptions to sales on news stands. If they could have locked news stands into exclusive relationships, they would have.

So I think we can expect to see more initiatives like this from these publishers. Right now they're flailing around blindly and making fools of themselves, but they are not going to give up on their actual goals and eventually are likely to get smart about it. It'll be interesting to see what that looks like, but I doubt any effective initiatives they may come up with will be to the benefit of news consumers.

[mankyd]

> The point is they want that traffic coming directly to them.

Very insightful and true. The problem is that they can't find a strategy to make this happen and are capitulating due to their lack of ability.

That is to say, _if_ they could find a way to make aggregator customers instead into their customers, they wouldn't be backing down. What they're discovering, however, is that, even if they weaken Google, they don't strengthen themselves in the process. Readers simply turn to other sources.

This implies that readers perhaps don't value Axel Springer's content over other news sources. Or, at least, they don't value it over the value of aggregators.

[trvz]

This is not about customer-middleman-publisher relationships, but the publishers wanting Google to advertise their crap and pay them for it, based on the false claim that the excerpts in the advertisement have copyrightable value; they don't.