Re: Interesting take on this
The publishers will make money if/when the punter chooses to click to read the content. So... make your articles interesting ('twas ever thus) and make your site interesting and useful.
It's not quite that simple though.
Just pulling a headline and snippet off the BBC quickly:
House Explosion leaves woman dead and two injured
Another woman and a child are taken to hospital after the blast which caused the house to collapse in Manchester.
Now, if the headline doesn't interest you, then $news have lost nothing anyway. But the snippet has given enough information that a good portion of people will have got the information and moved on.
The article itself goes on to describe more of the circumstances, but the nature of news articles is that the first sentence/para tends to give you the synopsis. That first para comes as a result of the work that yielded all the other information.
The News' sites argument is that Facebook's habit of showing a synopsis costs them traffic/ad impressions, not just that Facebook are making money off of doing so.
If you remember, there was a similar argument about Google News in Spain, where Google said "fuck you" and shut down Google News entirely in Spain.
There was a report a little while later which said that Spanish news publishers were doing much better as a result. You need a certain pinch of salt, because guess which industry commissioned it.
On the other hand, Google have gone another way with a similar dispute in France and said that they're not going to shut down Google News, they'll just kick all the French publishers out of it. That'd suggest there probably is some truth to the Spanish story.
None of it's easy, or black and white. Personally, I think there's some weight though to the argument that multinationals should probably be contributing toward the cost of generating good local content. Otherwise we're all going to get left with really, really crap news
Biting the hand that feeds IT
