Unnecessary confrontation

 
Guest commentary Swiss publishers have a problem with Google, says Andreas Göldi: The fact that search engine giant Google publishes headlines from newspaper articles on its news portal doesn't sit well with the print moguls - even though Google doesn't take full articles, but sends users to the relevant newspaper website. The trade press has recently reported that the Swiss Press Association (VSP) is even considering a lawsuit against Google. In addition, a consortium of Swiss-German publishers is reportedly considering setting up its own Internet service to compete with Google News.anyone following the international media scene closely can only wonder at this confrontational attitude on the part of the VSP. Leading publishers in the English-speaking world have been opening up their online offerings more and more to search engines, especially Google, for some time now. The reason is simple: between 20 and 40 percent of visitors to newspaper websites find this content via search engines. Hardly any publisher can or wants to do without the advertising revenue generated by these streams of readers. Given these realities, why the VSP wants to sue the world's most important traffic supplier remains a mystery. It must be an attempt to participate in the search engine giant's fat profits in some way. However, quite different calibers have already failed internationally.
The project of a Swiss competitor to Google News is also likely to have a hard time. Firstly, this idea comes about five years too late. Secondly, Internet users today demand the full range of news sources, not just the offerings of VSP member companies. And thirdly, online projects driven by consortia and associations have historically not exactly had a high success rate. Industry politics and complicated constellations of interests are the enemies of fast and customer-oriented innovation.
One can only wish the Swiss publishers - and many of their European colleagues, by the way - that they soon learn to accept how the Internet ecosystem works. In the online medium, the value streams are more complex and the competition tougher than in the cozy regional print monopolies. The presence of strong global players like Google may not always be pleasant, but complaining and confrontation will get you nowhere. If publishers want to participate in the rapid growth of the Internet, they should focus on their core competencies: high journalistic quality and regional roots. The web offerings of many Swiss publishers still offer plenty of room for improvement, and not only in this respect.
Andreas Göldi is an internet entrepreneur and is currently working on his next start-up idea in the USA. He blogs at www.medienkonvergenz.com.