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Did Google disown Burda?

Hubert Burda is publicly venting his grievance in the FAZ: Searchengines like Google are “silently disowning” content-producers. His reasoning is as follows: While quality-media (two of Burdas papers are the tabloids Superillu and Glücks-Revue) spend a lot of money to create great content, searchengines just take this content and keep a major share of the advertising profits. It is surely no coincidence, that he suddenly remembers this during an economic- as well as (print)-advertising recession. To change all this, he wants the government to intervene: they should adapt the laws so that publishing houses get a larger piece of the profits. It might not have been the smartest idea to use the music-industry as his role model in this.

It is rather difficult to give an appropriate answer to something like this – while in and of itself, these arguments might make sense because they mirror the self-conception of the post-WWII publishing houses in this country. Just because the print-market held double digit returns for many years, does not mean that they have any claim to similar return in this new interwebs. The simply slept through new developments for years and now, that the pie is already carved up, they suddenly realize that they won't do as well as they used to.

At the same time, no other sector get such preferential treatment from Google as publishing houses do: ACAP, kind of a vastly extended robots.txt was created in close partnership with publishing houses and things like “First-Click-Free” show a lot of good will towards the content-producers. But then again, it still seems to be much easier to seek the problems with other than with themselves which makes Google the perfect scapegoat. Chris Anderson from Wired shows that this does not have to be the consensus. He writes: “I consider that a gift, but newspapers consider it theft.”