Popping up in my subscription feed is a seemingly fraudulent Bitcoin discussion stream with Elons face, the channel thumbnail is now Tesla etc.
How on this flat earth could this have happened? Will Youtube aid in getting their channel back since all older videos seem to be either de-listed or removed?
Can someone explain why on Earth news media worldwide is so adement on wanting commission for traffic to their sites?
I mean, were I a search engine provider faced with this demand I would just say "Well I'm terribly sorry you feel that way, we will no longer feature you in search results" and let their viewership plummet.
Same with social media, if someone demands commission on traffic towards their site I would just make it impossible to share links towards them.
It's their loss, not one of Google or Facebook.
It is however unfortunate how desperate publishers have gotten for revenue and I sympathise with them, but they're picking the wrong fights here. Journalism is important, both general and investigatory, and they have a massive job of figuring out monetization going forward to keep the lights on.
Both of the laws asking to be always included in search results and the laws requiring search engines to pay to link to content fundamental a break how a search engine works. Both laws are absolutely ridiculous.
News media makes a profit by controlling voters and politicians. Selling papers is a loss making activity, an expense they pay to keep political influence. Actual investigative journalism is all but dead. News media knows Google has money. News media will make politicians make Google give them that money.
It's a racket. It's just not called that by the news media because its THEIR racket.
There is two parts to it, right? One is the link from Google to the news site, the other is pulling out enough content from the article so that the reader doesn't visit the new site.
If google's traffic (in readers) doesn't get to your website anyways, what do you have to lose?
