[by Dorian Benkoil] Michael Loeb, the CEO of Synapse Group, the largest seller of magazine subscriptions in the US and now owned by Time-Warner, recommended in a Q&A session of his keynote address that the magazine industry come up “with a competitive response” to Google and keep them from “getting the information for free.”
He said in the address that magazines should own the online space, because they predated the Web in doing what the Web is best at: Creating community around an identified niche, and that they have tremendous expertise in their niche areas.
But the magazines did not embrace the Web early on, and don’t own the space, now. Expedia and Travelocity own travel bookings, not Travel & Leisure. Cars.com has car sales, not Road & Track (his examples). I think trying at this point to compete with Google by trying to get the magazine industry to compete with it or block it is a losing strategy. Trying to make it a win-win, where Google drives traffic and is able to realize some revenue as does the one who gets the traffic, is a winning strategy, at least today. Synapse, he said, has sold 3.5 million subscriptions online this year, largely from Amazon. How can he get Google to facilitate that more?
He also said that bloggers are cheapening the value of the written word. I (perhaps a little too publicly and loudly) took umbrage at his assertions. He ignored the self-correcting nature of blogs – that the reputable ones take comments and get hammered for inaccuracies or fallacies. There are reputable blogs – some of them from mainstream publications like Business Week – others as standalones like, oh, I dunno, PaidContent.org? And I pointed out that magazines, too, run the gamut and there is schlock – whether stupidity or sleaze – in print as well. In other words, it’s not the medium that creates reliability. It’s the value of the content, over time.
I also strongly disagree with his complaint that Google is operating according to a pay-for-placement model, mixing editorial and commerce. Google very carefully tries to make sure that those who appear atop the free results with the most prominent placement are NOT paid for or in any way artificially put there other than by true popularity and usage. The paid links off to the right are labeled as sponsored results. If a commercial Web site comes up atop the natural search lisitngs, it’s because there is a legitimate perceived value from the online community.
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