Paying for news — Benedict Evans

Take this paragraph: it is just assumed that Google and Facebook ought to be paying publishers for their content, but any sort of rational evaluation would suggest that money should flow in the opposite direction. Google and Facebook direct traffic to publishers, and in Facebook’s case in particular, that traffic comes from the publishers themselve... See more

That doesn’t mean they can’t change, but so far, there has been a general unwillingness to look at the real problem. Rather than throwing out audacious claims like Facebook and Google should pay us for the right to send us traffic, we should, instead, be looking at finding ways to deliver value to our readers and ad partners in a way that platforms... See more

But it’s also because newspapers were an oligopoly, and they lose that oligopoly online. Newspapers are, yes, a content business, but they were also a light manufacturing business, and it was the replacement of light manufacturing and trucking with bits that removed the barrier to entry and unbundled their attention.