While Google (NSDQ: GOOG) takes increasing flak for monopolising advertising revenue, the search giant’s UK MD used a keynote at FIPP Magazine World Congress in London on Wednesday to tell publishers it’s “part of the solution” to the publishing downturn, not the problem.
Google has been criticised in recent months by The Newspaper Society and individual publishing groups for supposedly profiting off their content while media companies lose money. Matt Brittin told the conference Google “doesn’t have all the answers” but is “working hard on making monetisation for publishers a reality online.” Google sends a billion clicks a month to publishers’ sites and its AdSense platform paid out $5 billion to its partners last year, he said.
In what was a pretty blatant sales pitch, the former Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) exec said publishers should use tools like Google Trends, Google Insight and Google Analytics to target ads at readers. But: “In a world where everybody’s a publisher, what’s needed more than ever is editing skills and brands to guide people to content that’s useful“. Guides like Google, perhaps ?
Brittin summed up the structural problem facing magazines in a digital age: Google and Google News searches for celebrity gossip and tabloid-style stories have risen by 485 percent since 2005 while, at the same time, searches for magazine brands have grown just 225 percent. “Online it’s not the magazine brand (that people search for) it’s the story or the feature.”
— Recession: Brittin acknowledged the downturn was the most severe in memory – but, as envious loss-making publishers look on at Google’s continually growing profits, he held out an olive branch and repeated his pitch: “One of the things I believe as a media person through and through is that Google can be part of the solution. We have technology that can help people.”
— Monetisation is lagging: Google’s solutions are all well and good, but here’s the rub: “The challenge is the models of monetisation online and figuring out how to make that economically viable as your print products are – those models are lagging consumer behaviour.”
— UK’s digital powerhouse: “We have 20 percent of the population of the US but we have 60 percent of the e-commerce market”. The UK has “something like double the proportion of media and marketing spend online” compared to the US, France Germany or other major European markets.
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