Erich Schmidt’s remarks today at the Google Zeitgeist conference on how the company is trying to work with with news groups including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp on new revenue models reminded me of what I find striking about Google’s attitude.
It is that, despite the endless debate about whether newspapers or other news organisations should charge for access to their content online, Google itself is agnostic. As James Fallows reported in the Atlantic the other day:
People inside the press still wage bitter, first-principles debates about whether, in theory, customers will ever be willing to pay for online news, and therefore whether “paywalls” for online news can ever succeed. But at Google, I could hardly interest anyone in the question. The reaction was: Of course people will end up paying in some form- why even talk about it?
“We have no horse in that race or particular model in mind,” Krishna Bharat, one of the executives most deeply involved in Google’s journalistic efforts, told me, in a typical comment . . . . for Bharat and his colleagues, free-versus-paid is an empirical rather than theological matter. They’ll see what works.
Other people from Silicon Valley I have talked to also express bafflement at what they regard as an East Coast preoccupation. As far as they are concerned, the free versus not-free debate is long over and freemium has won.
Google may simply being polite in his efforts not to be regarded as the news business’s vulture, but I think it is genuine. Its attitude contrasts to the tendency of those such as Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian and Jeff Jarvis to equate innovation in online news with not charging.
As Mr Jarvis wrote of Mr Murdoch “pathetic” web strategy, under which The Times and The Sunday Times will charge online from this June:
By building his paywall around Times Newspapers, he has said that he has no new ideas to build advertising. He has no new ideas to build deeper and more valuable relationships with readers and will send them away if they do not pay. Even he has no new ideas to find the efficiencies the internet can bring in content creation, marketing, and delivery.
Entertaining though such rhetoric is, I’m on Mr Schmidt’s side in thinking that the answer to What Would Google Do? in the news business is: whatever works.
