The picture is from the worm creative
After the Google News homepage gets an exposure, article traffic will increase by leaps and bounds. We are not unfamiliar with this mode of cooperation between the aggregation platform and the media, and this chemical reaction is also known as the “Google News bump”.
But not long ago, Google News, which provides paid services, announced the complete shutdown of digital magazine services and a full refund for users. This means that users will not be able to purchase new or renewed magazines through Google News in the future, and related publishers will lose this traffic position.
Always, from 2012, Google launched the digital magazine application Play Magazines, and in 2018, the upgraded version of AI News, a news aggregation service using Google ’s technology, landed on the IOS client. It has indeed attracted a large number of digital users for traditional media.
But more than a year ago, the magazine section began to disappear from the Play Store web interface. Then we saw it, permanently stopped serving.
Is it that people do n’t like reading magazines so much that Google ca n’t even take it? The real situation is probably more complicated than imagined.
From entity to number but never disappears
For a long time, the industry likes to sell miserably, especially magazines and periodicals with high costs and long cycles. In recent years, there have been many reports of failures due to shortfalls.
In 2014, “Fashion Weekly”, “Programmer” and other magazines have ceased publication, and once known as “the most Internet-thinking magazine of the time”, “One Reading” is also inevitable. In 2017, the fascinating fashion magazine “SELF SE” has been suspended, which has become a death knell for traditional magazine media.
Did the magazine die?
It turns out that this content consumption demand can stand the test of time. Not long ago, in a research report by the analysis company Twipe on “Reshaping the Digital Journalism”, it was found that half of the readers like to read digital magazine-style digital news, of which Germany is the most prominent. 65.4% of the respondents, including even a small group of young people.
At the new product launch conference last spring 2019, Apple also launched an updated version of Apple News +, integrating more than 300 mainstream magazine subscriptions, such as New Yorker, National Geographic, and vogue.
Obviously, “e-zine” is not hopeless.
So, what are the industrial values of “e-zine”, or the gap with information flow products? First of all, “e-magazine” type reading time is more efficient and more in line with the content requirements of the Party for “packing important events”. It turns out that readers of “e-magazines” spend more time reading than information flow readers, which can reach 10 to 30 minutes.
At the same time, high-quality premium content is more likely to inspire audiences to pay. Compared to information flow fragmented messages where it is easy to find free alternative links, the “e-magazines” edited and selected have higher paid conversion rates and media loyalty.
In terms of advertising value, as a vertical medium of interest-driven and refined content, it is easier for advertisers to find target audiences and achieve better brand marketing results.
So why did Google choose to thoroughlyOff?
Resentment between Google and Magazines
We know that as a pioneer of news aggregation platform, Google News has never ceased to conflict with traditional media. The relationship between high-value media such as magazines and platforms is more subtle and tense. There are three types of grievances:
The first category is competition for core revenue “advertisers.”
The reason is also very simple. When the magazine media cooperates with the integration platform, while bringing large-scale traffic, it is also equivalent to offloading its own business value. Businesses quickly discovered that since magazines and Google share the same readership, it is clear that digital advertising on Google is much more monitorable and much cheaper. As a result, Google took over advertisers’ favor from the magazine media audience.
As early as 2008, Google News brought about $ 100 million in revenue to Google and has been steadily rising. In comparison, the overall situation of magazine media is much more bleak.
Second category: indifference to the demand for media payment.
Since the aggregation platform has taken over most of the advertising, giving traditional media a life-threatening blow, it is undoubtedly the best outcome to carry out some innovative reforms in the business model and strive for win-win.
This is what many aggregation platforms are trying. For example, Apple News bears more of the media’s propaganda role. According to “New York” magazine, Apple has not affected its own member subscription business, and it has brought incremental traffic. The Wall Street Journal even hired 50 reporters to form oneA team dedicated to providing news for Apple News.
Facebook pays some creators. Some insiders have pointed out that Facebook pays between $ 10,000 and $ 35,000 for short video shows and up to $ 250,000 for long video shows.
Others such as Microsoft News, Twitter and Snapchat are also trying to provide payment services. Only Google, nothing changed.
As early as 2014, Spain required Google to pay copyright taxes to publishers. Subsequently, Google chose to shut down the Spanish version of Google News. In 2018, the European Union also fined Google for a “link tax.”
In the face of the call, Google spokesperson McGill Schells (Maggie Shiels) said: “About (Paid Share) , Google has not yet reached any conclusions and needs to communicate with the publisher.”
The third category is the bias of technological advantages to commercial interests.
The technological advantage of technology companies was once seen as a magic weapon to help traditional media achieve digital transformation. But this weapon has also begun to lose “neutrality” in the face of Google’s own commercial interests, which has made the magazine media very uncomfortable.
There are many examples of this. For example, Google once introduced the (Accelerated Mobile Pages, AMP) , which standardized media page design, article recycling, and unit advertising types. This allows the media to get more search traffic. But optimizedAt the same time as the Google platform user experience, it has brought a lot of hidden dangers to the media.
On the one hand, the content is loaded too fast, and the advertisement is too late to load, which directly affects the media revenue. At the same time, the standardized form of presentation has also made the brand image and design tone that the media have long built disappeared.
At the same time, The effect of Google’s “technology for media” has not shown a proper balance in the actual process.
For example, digital dissemination makes original articles more difficult to define, and a painstaking report can soon be distributed across the Internet. In this regard, Facebook’s choice is to recruit human editors to let the people with the judgment of the news to defend the interests of the original creators when the algorithm cannot accurately perform the “original traceability” task.
And Google insists on technology first, and believes that “even the same news event, at different points in time, means different content for different editing rooms and media”, and chose an optimization algorithm to Deepen your understanding of the life cycle of news stories. Obviously, with the development of NLP technology, expecting Google to accurately identify the original is probably a roadblock and a long one.
Google’s “abuse” of technological weapons is also reflected in the voice portal.
With the flood of active push information, readers are beginning to escape from the “reminder little red dot”, and voice assistants have become a new entry point for consultation.
In the voice news project released by Google last year, it cooperated with the US financial media CNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post, etc., so that users of smart speakers can speak directly to get content.
This operation is also seen as monetizing yourself with other people’s content. The reason is also very simple, because compared to web pages, voice can not bring traffic to the media at all, and further weakens the brand image of the media itself. In addition to being a “content mover”The possibility of losing almost all commercial value. The Google platform will also deliberately lead users to Google’s own applications, rather than the media’s own digital service platform.
Actually, on March 26 last year, the BBC announced that it would remove its podcasts from Google Podcasts’ system and revoke access to the content of Google Assistant and Google Home smart speakers. And asked Google to remove the BBC from this special ranking system (Google products take precedence over media platforms) , but was rejected by Google.
Google’s tug-of-war with traditional media has made the “magazine service shutdown” a staged result. It is difficult to say that the two sides won or lost. But what is certain is that each other also needs to set sail again and move forward.
Smart starting for e-zine
Where do magazines and journals go after leaving Google News? Expectations are yes.
On the one hand, after several years of digital exploration, many magazines have begun to switch to producing content on digital platforms, including self-built websites, launch of electronic journals, etc.
Meanwhile, a large number of magazines have also explored successful paywall models. “Wired” launched the paywall service in 2018, and within one year subscriptions increased by 272%, reaching 100,000 subscriptions. New Yorker Magazine’s subscription volume also increased by 130% after implementing the payment mechanism. In China, magazines such as GQ and Caixin have also successfully implemented paid reading.
It turns out that high-quality content products, even in the dazzling digital content market, still have a long-lasting history.Reading value.
At the same time, the technological awareness of traditional media has begun to increase, actively connecting with new technologies.
Video, virtual reality, and other forms of content interaction have begun to be introduced into the dissemination process. For example, Get Wired is trying to introduce AR / VR technology to digital platforms to provide readers with new narrative methods.
The emergence of Rong media has also allowed magazine producers to reshape their relationship with advertisers. With the unique vertical segmentation attribute of the magazine and the integration of productized content production methods, for brand customers, it can play a product promotion that cannot be achieved by a pan-audience information platform. For example, the New York Times ’T Brand Studio has begun to provide GM, Philips, Mercedes-Benz, Netflix and other gold owners with original creative advertisements with the temperament of the“ New York Times ”. For example, the limited edition fitness products in cooperation with the e-commerce Target website have realized the dual benefits of brand tone and business revenue.
From this perspective, there are reasons to believe that if you leave the magazine media of Google News, you will be reborn. And how long will Google News itself support under the circumstances of “lost help?”