The Get Down Guy

continuations:

Yesterday I wrote that a potential MSFT-NEWS deal is all about GOOG’s splitting of the profit pie (sorry - no links - writing on BB). As I have been thinking more about this, the most striking thing to me is how many people seem to dismiss any claim to a payment by content owners out of hand with statements such as “they should be glad that Google is sending traffic their way.” But let’s consider an alternative universe for a moment. In that universe Google started from day one to apply the an AdSense-like profit splitting to AdWords. If you want to participate as a site owner you just add a file to your server. Now whenever Google makes money on a click through on a results page that contains content from your server you get a tiny fraction of that (along with everyone else on that page). As enough accumulates you get paid. In this alternative universe would a lot of the same people assert that Google should stop paying content providers? I really don’t think so and that’s why I believe ideas like this cannot be dismissed outright. Google could have (and still might) design a system that splits search economics differently. It is fascinating to imagine how well off the Wikimedia foundation would be in such a world. They almost certainly would not have to run ads asking for donations!

This is a good point.  If Google was paying content providers already, Bing would be doing it and so would Yahoo!.  I agree that no one would be pushing for Google and other search providers to stop paying content providers.

All it takes is for enough people to decide that the trade off is not worth it anymore.  If enough people follow News Corp, I don’t think the long tail can make up the difference for Google.  They’ll have to make deals like this to split search revenue or pay an indexing fee for premium content.