A house of cards comprises slender pieces of paper precariously balanced atop others, all living together in flimsy points of contact that agreed to cement the whole with just love and fresh air. If you consider the bits and pieces architecture of the entire system and how it has been balanced atop an ocean of fleeting trust, Google’s house, as imposing as it looks, is pretty much the same.
And there is Facebook, which gained members by the millions and then rose to a billion. The financiers weren’t sure for a long time on how to monetise that footfall. Finally, data sales became a controversial source, landing them in the Cambridge Analytica mess. That is another house of cards.
Now that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has etched out a three-year path breaking deal with Google, a scary, stiff breeze has started blowing through the top storeys of these houses. The clamour was for payment for news. This deal will see Google pay for 30 News Corp. publications, including The Wall Street Journal in the US to The Times in the UK and Sky News in Australia. Such information will feature in Google’s News Showcase section.
News content is not big business for Google. While Google’s overall, worldwide revenues increased to over $160 billion in 2019, the news searches within that was miniscule. News makes up for only 12.5 percent of Google’s searches in Australia. Other multimillion-dollar deals have been struck between Google and other Australian publishers, including Seven West, Nine Entertainment and Junkee Media, reports say.
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