62 Distribute and Be Damned
time when the growth of mobile and apps offered potential relief from a
decade of reading for free on the web. Even here, Google’s growth was
not entirely benign: while Apple had begun pushing a business model
from the very beginning that would encourage app developers to charge
for content, Android’s app store tended to foreground free apps instead.
Putting such user behaviour to one side, the replacement to FCF was also
an extension of Google’s underlying policy: it offered publishers some
flexibility over how many articles could be offered but, as Critchlow observes, to maintain search visibility, even content behind paywalls must
be clearly marked as machine-readable text – meaning that it is also
clearly labelled in the search engine as subscription-only.
83
FCF is dead:
long live the first free click.
Distribution and the New Public Sphere
The digital duopoly of Google and Facebook has been a defining factor
in shaping the media landscape since 2010. Taplin refers to the effects of
this duopoly as a process of “digital destruction”, observing that the Big
Four’s jealous guardianship over their own technological monopolies is
matched only by a scant regard for creative intellectual property:
What we have been witnessing since 2005 is a massive reallocation
of revenue from creators of content to owners of platforms … More
people than ever are listening to music, reading books, and watching movies, but the revenue flowing to the creators of that content
is decreasing while the revenue flowing to the four big platforms is
increasing.
84
The relations between media and technologies of distribution have always been, at best, a symbiotic one: content creators require an audience
to be successful, and distributors require something to disseminate. The
danger posed by Facebook and Google in their current format is that
they are too successful, and thus threaten the very content that they
require to drive their own business models. The modifications that took
place in Facebook’s News Feed were intended to deliver “high-quality”
stories alongside personal flows of information – for all that, Facebook
may have unintentionally contributed more than any other organisation
to the growth of fake news which is the subject of the next chapter.
Such was Google’s concern that, in 2017, it established the Digital News
Innovation Fund to disburse €150 million over three years to support
journalism across Europe. It would be very easy to dismiss this as a PR
stunt in the light of its €2.7 billion fine by the EU. Nonetheless, such
sponsorship – while raising all sorts of questions about how a private
company may effectively influence the development of future journalism
via what is, in effect, patronage – is a recognition of how the balance
time when the growth of mobile and apps offered potential relief from a
decade of reading for free on the web. Even here, Google’s growth was
not entirely benign: while Apple had begun pushing a business model
from the very beginning that would encourage app developers to charge
for content, Android’s app store tended to foreground free apps instead.
Putting such user behaviour to one side, the replacement to FCF was also
an extension of Google’s underlying policy: it offered publishers some
flexibility over how many articles could be offered but, as Critchlow observes, to maintain search visibility, even content behind paywalls must
be clearly marked as machine-readable text – meaning that it is also
clearly labelled in the search engine as subscription-only.
83
FCF is dead:
long live the first free click.
Distribution and the New Public Sphere
The digital duopoly of Google and Facebook has been a defining factor
in shaping the media landscape since 2010. Taplin refers to the effects of
this duopoly as a process of “digital destruction”, observing that the Big
Four’s jealous guardianship over their own technological monopolies is
matched only by a scant regard for creative intellectual property:
What we have been witnessing since 2005 is a massive reallocation
of revenue from creators of content to owners of platforms … More
people than ever are listening to music, reading books, and watching movies, but the revenue flowing to the creators of that content
is decreasing while the revenue flowing to the four big platforms is
increasing.
84
The relations between media and technologies of distribution have always been, at best, a symbiotic one: content creators require an audience
to be successful, and distributors require something to disseminate. The
danger posed by Facebook and Google in their current format is that
they are too successful, and thus threaten the very content that they
require to drive their own business models. The modifications that took
place in Facebook’s News Feed were intended to deliver “high-quality”
stories alongside personal flows of information – for all that, Facebook
may have unintentionally contributed more than any other organisation
to the growth of fake news which is the subject of the next chapter.
Such was Google’s concern that, in 2017, it established the Digital News
Innovation Fund to disburse €150 million over three years to support
journalism across Europe. It would be very easy to dismiss this as a PR
stunt in the light of its €2.7 billion fine by the EU. Nonetheless, such
sponsorship – while raising all sorts of questions about how a private
company may effectively influence the development of future journalism
via what is, in effect, patronage – is a recognition of how the balance