Written on August 26, 2008 – 3:36 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Every once in a while we publish an interview with a start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.
This time we’re interviewing Shafqat from NewsCred. He works from Geneva, Switzerland. Together with his Sweden-based business partner Iraj, he founded a digital newspaper that aggregates hundreds of news sources. The Newscred community votes on the crediblity of articles, authors and news sources. Iraj and Shafqat then apply their CredRank algorithms to ensure you only get the highest quality news from desired news sources. The quality is even higher than that from Google News or Yahoo News, the Swiss/Swedish company claims. I guess you can never aim high enough.
How did you come up with the idea of NewsCred?
“The idea for NewsCred originated during many late-night, coffee-fueled debates over the future of newspapers and traditional media between my cofounder (Iraj) and myself. It was the summer of 2007, and we spent a lot of time in cafes and bars on the banks of Lake Geneva brainstorming our crazy ideas. It was clear to us that the media industry was broken, and it seemed like the entire news space was one of the few traditions that wasn’t yet disrupted by the latest web technologies. On top of that, every single person we spoke to told us that they were getting fed up of news that was biased or inaccurate or just not transparent. It seemed like a big enough problem to tackle, so we decided to give it a go!” (more…)
I hope you like that post!
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Written on July 24, 2008 – 2:16 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Marissa Mayer at web 2.0 conference in 2006, picture from
D Farber (CC)
Marissa Mayer, head of search products and user experience at Google, put a number on the site’s revenue during a speech at the Fortune Brainstorm conference earlier this week. Fortune editor Jon Fortt about the income model: “The online giant figures that Google News funnels readers over to the main Google search engine, where they do searches that do produce ads. And that’s a nice business. Think of Google News as a $100 million search referral machine”
It seems that Google News generates $100 million revenue per year, despite the lack of ads or an obvious revenue model. Google news has been a sensitive subject before, and Mayer might have put even more pressure on the legal team with her comments on revenue. Until recently, the Google legal team could argue that the site was not profiting from the service. The site is more liable for a court case since the site’s referring features turns out to be a cash cow for the search portal.
Valleywag reporter Nicholas Carlson, shared an interesting perspective. “When she puts a number on how much money Google News makes for her employer, she gives newspapers’ lawyers a big, fat, juicy reason to demand a cut of the business. Sure, the newspapers already make money from the traffic Google sends their way — but do you think, given a $100 million prize, they won’t try to double-dip?” He notes that Mayer is worth hundreds of millions, and that Google might as well can fetch the check for the legal bill with her.
Written on July 2, 2008 – 11:31 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
About a month ago I reported that Belgian newspaper publisher Copiepresse demanded that Google should pay €49 million to compensate for the damage listings in Google News had caused them. A weird case, and not just because Copiepresse can easily prevent these listings. What struck me the most was the old-fashioned attitude of the Belgian media company. Call me naive, but I expected the executives of traditional media companies to be visionary enough to realize Google News brings them nothing but traffic. Was I shocked back then, now I’m really amazed by the next step of Copiepresse: they’re suing the EU’s news aggregator NewsExplorer.
This aggregation service from the European Commission wants to help visitors to grasp cultural differences among the EU by showing articles from all countries concerning the same matter. This unique piece of technology is a bit too modern for the Copiepresse conservatives, who prefer officials that use scissors and scrap books to collect the latest European news - behind closed doors. Just imagine helping out citizens by publicly organizing news.
Forgive me my cynicism and lack of respect for traditional business models. It’s just plain frustrating to see a large media company trying to destroy an emerging world of news and information. Copiepresse fails to see threats to their business models as challenges and tries to keep us in a bygone age of information.
There are only two positive notes here: the court has tossed out the case, based on jurisdictional grounds (so there’s hope for Google too), and what goes around, comes around. A company that only sees threats in the digital revolution, will find itself dismantled in a few deccenia. The only thing that bothers me about that, is the waste of journalistic talent.
Written on May 28, 2008 – 4:41 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Some media companies are still holding on to their old-values, desperately trying to make money like they used to. Take Copiepresse for example, this Belgian French-language newspaper company wants Google News to pay them 49 million Euros. Why? Because Google News drives traffic to their sites? Because Google News introduces kids to this strange phenomenon called newspapers? No.., the way Copiepresse sees it, Google News is stealing away ad revenue by indexing the articles published by Copiepresse’s newspapers.
Sad but true, Copiepresse has already won a case like this against Google in 2006. And now they’re after the money.
Apart from the fact that Copiepresse can prevent the indexing by creating a robot.txt file, their attitude is simply embarrassing. Instead of profiting from all the beautiful opportunities the new web offers, Copiepresse just focuses on destruction.
Not only symbolizes this complaints of many media experts like Dan Lyons - aka Fake Steve Jobs-, it also ruins the reputation of traditional media in general. There’s a lot of talent and potential in that industry which I and probably many others would like to welcome in this beautiful new world, yet their executives are way too busy looking backwards. I’m sorry guys, those good old one-to-many days are almost over.
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