The fact is, Google's changes didn't really negatively impact Demand Media, and what many miss is that "content farms" in their purest form are not really the target of Google (regardless of what they say), but scraper sites, not websites with a lot of content written by people you never heard of, are. Scraper sites actually steal text word for word and must be attacked.
But that anti-little-blogger bias has blinded many from seeing the truth: Google has it's own content farm, and it's called Blogger.
As I stated to a Google exec at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 in New York, if Google installed a full permalink for blog titles, and allowed for a special Blogger-specific news site map for Blogger blogs to be on Google News, Google could, in one fell swoop, wipe out many traditional media seeking online traffic in the age of the demise of print media (as we know it).
That Google has not done that - choosing instead to protect traditional media and run away from would-be-meaningful legal battles - allowed firms like Associated Content and Demand Media to grow.
Google completely missed the boat. With Blogger users employing Google AdSense, the perfect chance to increase revenues from ads placed on Blogger blogs, and give Blogger users more chances to earn money was missed, and all for the action of saving the Associated Press, and courting Rupert Murdock, who once threatened to take his content off Google.
Who cares.
That Demand Media earned $76 million last quarter should give pause to any reasonable observer in or out of Google. And if Google CEO Larry Page isn't saying to himself "that should have been mine," he's missing the point.
Content farms are the future, and it doesn't matter if they're controlled by Demand Media, Yahoo, or rest, untapped, in Google's Blogger system, each time a person makes a blog or a blog post, and that's thousands of times a day, they contribute to this sea of content.
Google could do itself, and the many users of the Blogger.com platform, a massive favor and unleash the full power of Blogger, connected with Google News, and Google AdSense. Whatever fears of government intervention could be diminished by encouraging open competition with other content farms.
It's time for Google to cry havoc, and let slip the blogger dogs of war!
No comments:
Post a Comment