Paying for news — Benedict Evans

Newspaper revenue really started to collapse well over a decade ago, and we've been discussing what to do about it for almost as long.

None of the issues have changed much: newspapers had an oligopoly of attention and an oligopoly of a certain kind of advertising reach, and the internet removed both of these.

Meanwhile, Google and Facebook created huge new ad businesses on the internet, that advertisers prefer, and some newspaper companies think that somehow or other they should get some of that money.

'Big internet platforms' send traffic to newspapers, which is worth money to them, but now they must also pay the newspaper companies for those links, or to use the snippets and extracts that the newspapers give them (yes, all those extracts are controlled by newspapers).

No-one has ever paid to link, regardless of their market power. No-one has ever asked me to pay to link to them, and if asked I would refuse, and I have no market power at all. You don’t have to ask the hypothetical “what would happen if Google and Facebook had less market power - would they pay for links?” You can just look at, well, every other s... See more