Thread · 6 tweets · 21 Jan 2021

Ha, "adtech expert" — what can I have done to justify such ire, @swodinsky? Jokes aside, this is… complicated. I'm still mulling over what a good approach would be. If Google still ran a "turnstile" SERP that mostly directed traffic elsewhere, I don't think they should pay.

Of course, that's what they say they do. But it's pretty obvious to everyone else that that's BS. The majority of the links in SERP point back to Google. They use knowledge others have invested to build for snippets, voice, etc.

There's also AMP, that benefits Google at a high cost to publishers in terms of CPMs, conversions, implementation. They keep saying that they don't derive much money from news and yet they keep coming up with ways to force news content to be hosted on their own platform…

I mean AMP, News, Showcase, Discover, SXG… they'll basically do anything other than let publishers host their own content. At some point, if they keep pushing in that direction, they should expect to pay for it. But I have strong misgivings about heading there.

Eventually in that world we end up with Google running Web content (at least news) in the same way they run video with YouTube — aka like a train wreck made of dumpster fires.

My conspiracy theory is that, in its negotiations with @Adlc_, @acccgovau, etc. Google is playing hard to get to give them the impression that they're resisting, but it's actually what they want: host the Web as its own walled garden and control monetisation.