Es geht weiter heiß her im Land Down Under. Wie wir bereits vorletzte Woche berichteten drohte Google mit dem vollständigen Abzugs seines Suchdienstes aus Australien. Ein neues Mediengesetz sieht anteilig Geld für die Publisher vor und verlangt zudem die transparente Offenlegung der mit dem jeweiligen Werk erzeugten Einnahmen. Das Thema hat uns - insbesondere nach dieser Meldung - nicht in Ruhe gelassen und so haben wir unseren Freund Dan Petrovic angeschrieben und ihm um seine ganz persönliche Einschätzung gebeten. Dan war bereits mehrfach auch in Deutschland zu Gast als Speaker auf der SMX bzw. sogar auf der SMX Advanced und ist einer der schlauesten SEO-Köpfe auf dem internationalen Markt.
Hier sind seine Gedanken zum Thema:
*Back in 2019, I flagged one of Google's algo updates with the importance of rewarding quality journalism. At the time, Australian consumer watchdog had just initiated their "Digital Platforms Inquiry". Interestingly, monetisation wasn't the sole focus on this inquiry. In fact ACCC wanted to establish a channel of communication between publishers and media platforms to ensure that the original author gets the preferred spot in Google (as opposed to a scraper for instance). This is a fair point considering how vulnerable Google is to this sort of exploit.
From the report: "digital platforms would need clear signals as to which article is ‘original’, and these signals may not always exist"
Later on this request may have been misconstrued as newspapers wanting to know Google's algorithm secrets which would of course be a ridiculous request.
Nearly two years later Google is having a fight with the media and it's boiled down to just money. Google thinks that ACCC wants them to pay newspapers for showing their news stories, while ACCC just wants the news and Google to be free to negotiate for this to happen.
In a knee-jerk move Google starts appealing to a wider Australian audience. It's an unprecedented move in which scary sounding alerts reach millions of users in search, Youtube and via Chrome. Except, a typical Australian user simply doesn't care.
Here comes my main point.
Did anyone ask users what they want?
I did. And what I learned is no surprise. Australians hate paywall: https://dejanmarketing.com/paywall/
So what do we do?
- Newspapers want to monetise their stories.
- Society wants to benefit from reliable and neutral journalism.
- Google doesn't want to pay money to show news results.
- Users hate paywall because it provides bad user experience.
The solution is simple.
Newspapers that are happy to monetise via ads should be happy to get the free click from Google and should therefore shut up about being paid for the click. In fact Google's whole business model is the complete opposite. People pay Google for the click to their website.
Newspapers that don't monetise via ads should be presented as a paid product in Google's search results and an easy pay pay read or ongoing subscription option should be available to users within the snippet. Failing that, as a paywall, which was labelled in SERPs. Another solution could be Netflix-like, where a user subscribes to "premium news" for a small monthly fee giving them access to all premium content from all participating publishers.
I approached Google with this solution and was politely but firmly put down as having a lack of understanding for the matter: https://twitter.com/dejanseo/status/1290517981206700034*
Thank you, Dan!
Dem ist unserer Meinung nach nichts hinzuzufügen, höchstens vielleicht der Wunsch nach einer international einheitlichen Linie und das wird leider schwer bis unmöglich.