Mark Cuban is right. This is why we take every opportunity in this blog to point out that newspapers and magazines need to stop giving away their content for free in the hopes that web traffic will magically result in revenue. It is not working and never will. There is too much online inventory for print pubs to ever realize a premium for their online products. The only ones benefiting are search engines and they make enough money without being subsidized by print.

Full story here

Excerpt from AdWeek:

Content aggregators and search engines are vampires, and newspapers are the chesty blondes who fall victim to their charms -- and ultimately get bitten.

That's the basic assessment of the traditional media business' approach to the Internet, according to Mark Cuban. During a keynote address today at the AlwaysOn OnMedia NYC 2010 Conference, the HDNet president/CEO and famed provocateur called for newspapers and magazines to fight back against sites that link to their content.

"Everybody wants to take your content," said the Dallas Mavericks owner before a room full of media executives gathered at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York. That's not going to change, "unless you put a stake through their gosh darn hearts."

Cuban particularly called out Google as a Web giant that continues to reap benefits off of the valuable content that traditional media companies produce. "Google is a vampire, and you run scared," he said. "There is no reason to be indexed in Google."

For too long, Cuban said, newspaper and magazines have viewed traffic to their Web sites the same way that stores view customers coming through the door -- and have been fearful of turning down any opportunity for more traffic. Yet, he said, readers who find headlines via Google rarely convert to traffic, and publishers have a hard time monetizing that traffic. "You haven't gotten anything back except that you've turned into zombies," Cuban said.

Plus, in his mind, Google reaps the branding benefit of that content when consumers access it through a search or through Google News. "Whose brand do you think [users] have in their minds?" he asked.

In this excerpt from an article on Google Wave by the Newspaper Association of America, the NAA gives us just another example of how the organization continues to misunderstand how its members make the money they use to pay its dues. Google Wave does not offer any sustainable revenue stream for publications. If everyone would give away their content for free, a lot of people could come up with a cool way of displaying it too. But Wave does nothing for the publications who actually have to pay people to go out and write stories. Hard to believe that the NAA consistently misses this point, maybe they believe, as Google does, that as long as your motto says you intend to do no harm, it is ok to wrip off print publications.

Here is what they said. Full story here, if you have the stomach to read it.

As Google Wave ends its first year of existence, we have learned two things:

First, there’s no shortage of critics who are happy to argue that the Google product, which combines threaded conversations with collaborative document editing and a host of embedded interactive gadgets, may be a technology searching for a purpose.

Second, the term “beta” applied to a Google product means just that for a change—until a recent round of bug fixes, the service slowed to a crawl or crashed as soon as the number of visitors participating in a “wave” reached the kind of critical mass a media site would draw.

Does that mean newspapers should wait to begin experimenting with Wave? Not at all – especially given its potential to shape conversations both within and beyond news organizations, argue early industry dabblers in the technology.

“Think about how many newsrooms would have killed to be on top of a social media tool like Twitter four years ago, before it became as popular,” says Chris Taylor, online editor of TBO.com, who oversees converged Web operations for The Tampa Tribune and WFLA-TV. “We want to make sure our newsroom is familiar with Wave so if it becomes the next great tool for media consumption, we know how to be there for our audience.”

From SeekingAlpha, read full story here.

Mark Cuban makes some good points, He obviously isn't familiar with Mediabids- that's ok, I am not sure how the Mavericks are doing this season, so we are even. But seriously, worth reading and it is always worthwhile to read someone calling Google out for its hypocrisy.

Google (GOOG) is unquestionably the best at selling advertising online. They can sell Text, Display, Video at a level that is unparalleled anywhere. True ? The Newspaper industry obviously sucks at doing the same. Eric Schmidt said so in his editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

So why isn’t Google taking advantage of this unique opportunity ? Why not just offer a specially tailored version of AdSense for Newspapers ? They do what they do, create content. You do what you do, generate content and sell ads ?

Makes sense. Won't happen.

Why ? Because of the Google hypocrisy in play. This argument is no different than the same argument they made with Youtube and the music and film industries. All those movies, tv shows, music videos on Youtube were GREAT PROMOTION. The music and movie industries shouldn't blame Google if they don’t know how to monetize all the billions of views and impressions Google and Youtube provided the content industry. Right?

But a funny thing happened along the way. Google caved on Youtube. Their message is no longer “if you cant monetize the traffic, tough luck”. Youtube is now sharing revenue with as many music and video content sources as they can. They are even setting up VEVO a satellite music video site built around Universal Music Group content.

There is absolutely zero chance that the end of this discussion is Google saying “You will take our traffic and like it”. Google is posturing. They recognize they have the advantage. Particularly if MicroSoft/Bing (MSFT) do nothing with Newscorp (NWS). Its only a question of how they use it.

A step in the right direction. About time Google started paying a decent price for content. Let's hope the AP holds firm on a decent deal. From PaidContent.org. Full story here.

Google Stops Hosting AP Content

In a sign that Google’s negotiations with the Associated Press over a new licensing contract may have reached a standstill, new AP articles are no longer being hosted in Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News; Search Engine Land‘s Danny Sullivan, who first reported the development, says that new AP articles haven’t been hosted on the site since Dec. 24. Google isn’t providing an explanation. The company’s full statement: “We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Some of that content is still available today. At the moment we’re not adding new hosted content from the AP.”

However, the AP has been in the process of renegotiating its licensing agreement with Google, as well as the big portals—and there have been signs that at least the Google talks have not been going so well. AP CEO Tom Curley, for instance, hinted in October that Google, unlike Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), hadn’t been willing to acquiesce to some of the AP’s demands, including that it have access to real-time metrics. “We haven’t talked. We haven’t talked. We haven’t talked with them in any serious way,” he said.

The Google deal dates back to three years ago, when the AP gave Google a license to use its content in unspecified ways. In August 2007, Google began to host material produced by the AP, along with other news agencies, directly on Google News for 30 days.

Sullivan theorizes that because the agreement is set to expire at the end of January, Google may be trying to avoid the complication of hosting AP stories that would have to be pulled down in fewer than 30 days. Presumably, that wouldn’t be a concern if it was clear that both sides were willing to re-up.

 

Google Fast Flip went live yesterday (view it here). Fast Flip is Google's self proclaimed revolutionary news reading tool that allegedly combines the best of print and online creating a user interface which will alter the experience of reading, giving the viewer unlimited access to virtually all that is worth knowing. To me it is just sort of confusing. What is disappointing about this is that Google has been working on this since, I am pretty sure, 2003. That is a long time for something which appears to be pretty basic. 

There are some cool features: being able to scroll through multiple publications to review their coverage of similar news items is clever. Google is sharing revenue with the publications who participate based on the clicks that their pages generate, which is good. However, in return the publications had to give their content minus any of their own advertising, which is a big price to pay for participation in a revenue sharing deal.

Fast Flip is worth watching and once Google irons out some of the bugs, no doubt it will become a valuable tool for some people. But the launch of Fast Flip appears to be more about PR than revolution, a common theme among many of Google's new products.

As we have learned from their foray into print, Google is not immune to spectacularly bad ideas. But as a person in print, Google's attempt to bolster its TV offerings through customizable TV ads is worth paying attention to. The dream of customizable TV ads is that ads can be created with appeal for a specific audience and then delivered only to that audience. The ramifications for the rest of the advertising world if this were to become the norm, could be enormous. For print it might mean that, in order to appeal to advertisers, print products would have to become more defined in their audience and much better at measuring who is actually reading.  

Google TV Ads operates an auction-based system for purchasing targeted ads on EchoStar, similar to Google’s specialty online. Under the new arrangement with Visible World, Google will be able to use its software, which lets advertisers and ad firms adjust a spot by altering its graphics, music and as well as the script.

Full story here.