European news organizations bleeding money and readers are trying to avoid extinction by asking governments in France, Germany and Italy to step in and charge Google for using their content in its search results - something the Web giant has always done for free.
Critics - including, unsurprisingly, Google - say the strategy is shortsighted and self-destructive, and the search engine warns it will stop indexing European news sites if forced to pay. But publishers advocating a "Google tax" aimed at benefiting their industry point to the example of Brazil, where their counterparts abandoned the search engine and say repercussions have been minimal. [...]
French publishers, along with counterparts in Germany and Italy, are hoping Brazil will be the proof that there is a successful way to confront Google.
After failing to come to terms with Google in the past year, Brazil's biggest papers - representing 90 percent of circulation - decided to boycott Google News by essentially making their content unavailable to anyone using the search engine. The result? Negligible losses in Web traffic, the Brazilian papers say.
Brazilian newspapers haven't ruled out reopening talks with Google, if the company whose name is synonymous with "search" agrees to pay for their content. Unlike in Europe, the Brazilian publishers have not turned to their government to act as a mediator or impose a tax as part of their dealings with Google.
"Newspapers live off advertising revenues, like Google. They're our competition and they have billions and billions in revenues globally," said Ricardo Pedreira, executive director of Brazil's National Association of Newspapers.
Convém também ler este "Publishers can survive digital kryptonite":
It is tempting for publishers to focus only on digital strategies, but they must also think about how to manage their declining print businesses and how to keep up the value of their journalism, regardless of medium. The music industry discovered this to its cost. For a decade after Napster launched, executives scurried to find new digital business models, neglecting the CD even as it represented a majority of their revenues. Newspapers and magazines risk repeating the mistake.
For more than a decade, investors have asked publishers what their digital strategies are. It is time to ask about their print strategies, too.
