IN RECENT months Google and Facebook have made changes that may escape the notice of most of their billions of users, but not of news organisations. Facebook began displaying the logos of publishers in some of its posts, so readers can identify the news source. And Google for the first time gave publishers the ability to control how many times the search engine’s users can visit news sites free of charge. Both will directly help papers to sell subscriptions.
To critics of the social-media giants, that might look like wolves offering to help the sheep while still feasting on the herd. The business of both Facebook and Alphabet, parent of Google and YouTube, is to occupy people’s time and attention with their free services and content, and to sell ads against those eyeballs. For them, quality journalism is just another hook.
Facebook calls its “News Feed” offering its most important product, but in recent years it has tweaked the feed in ways that de-emphasise actual...Continue reading
from Business and finance http://www.economist.com/news/business/21731194-new-concessions-social-media-firms-are-unlikely-help-publishers-much-publishers-are?fsrc=rss
No comments:
Post a Comment