AFP Suit Killing News Site
One news website, Political Gateway, released a particularly emotional article/editorial, where they basically credit Agence France-Presses with killing them as a website. Their story: They paid for AFP content, so when Google began removing AFP content from Google News, they removed Political Gateway entirely. All efforts to get them put back in, including removing anything resembling AFP content, have fallen on deaf ears. As they say, “We are no longer a viable news source”.
This truly proves how clueless AFP is. They are a business, concerned with selling supposedly valuable content to news organizations. By not contacting any of their customers before engaging in a reckless legal action against the world’s most popular content finder, they did their customers a disservice, and gave them no time to save themselves. If AFP wants to shoot all of their customers in the head, they should offer refunds to anyone that was hurt by their just pointless posturing. Not only are they going to lose this lawsuit (there are plenty of prior rulings supporting Google, and the suit was filed in the United States, not France), but don’t be surprised if AFP gets sued themselves.
Oh, and Google, I know you’re reading. If they’ve removed the content, why aren’t you putting them back in?
I’m reprinting the entire text of Political Gateway’s article, in case their site goes down. However, please try to read it on their site first, they could use the traffic.
How AFP killed an Online News Site by Suing Google
Reader count for this story: 4276Political Gateway.com- Mar 23 – Last Thursday AFP, a French based news service and the oldest news service in the world, sued Google, the biggest search engine in the world for copyright infringement. An amount around 17 million was asked for in damages. This story will give you an overview of the situation and the damage it has done.
Updates are at the bottom of this story
AFP is saying Google presents AFP headlines and summaries on the search engine news aggregator. And that is more than ‘fair use’ and they need to ‘pay up’. Google has no ads on the news service and Google is just one of many news aggregators out there. What Google does is common practice on the web.
Topix.net is another example. Just today an announcement of a merger with Topix.net and a few companies like the New York Times show how important these services are for readers and businesses alike.
No matter how you look at it, AFP will lose this battle. It is inherently just an attempt to extort money out of Google. What AFP does not realize is how badly they have damaged their clients. Political Gateway is one of their clients and we have been devastated.
Google decided to respond to the extortion and stupidity of the lawsuit by actually winning the battle. Google’s response? They stopped syndicating the news from sites using AFP of which this site is one. Not only is our AFP news not syndicated, but our editorials and independent news feeds are also blacklisted. Any news posted after Tuesday morning at 3am cannot be found on Google anywhere. It is a matter of time before the other services that ‘grab’ our news follow suit.
What does this mean for our site? No news aggregation, no news syndication, no news on search engines, no readers can find us, no traffic. Add all this up and you can see the economic value of the site is gone.
Perhaps suing AFP would make up the difference.
So what to do now?
We have tried contacting Google over and over. We have deleted almost all AFP content (which we paid dearly for) to try to appease them. Not a single answer back. AFP just says ‘sorry’. Soon the other news systems will kill us too.
Political Gateway is only one of two news services in the US that use AFP and are syndicated by Google. We are not sure who the other one is, but we are trying to find this out. We offered an independent and worldly news service that differed from most including some top notch editorialists. Now no one can find us on newer news topics.
It is over, AFP killed us. We are no longer a viable news source. We feel sorry AFP employees may soon be laid off, but you cannot expect customers to stay with them for long while getting killed financially.
Our recent upgrades to the server to handle the traffic cost us dearly. The monthly total cost of the site went up significantly with the new servers to handle the load. We no longer have that traffic, or income, to pay these high prices.
In time the lawsuit will end, AFP will lose, Google and AFP will compromise and all will be as it was. Except for sites like this one who will lose financially and emotionally, as it always is when big business collide.
Perhaps we will sue AFP for 17 million for screwing us.
Updates:
Google will not answer any of our mails or questions nor will AFP. They have no comment. I can think of a few comments for both of them.
We tried to get Reuters, but they start at 3,000 a month. Whew, that is a high ‘get started price’.
Then we tried AP but they never called or wrote back (not unusual for those guys at all)
Then we tried UPI, United Press International. For two days we have been waiting for an example of their news as there is not ONE place online that uses their full news feed for us to check out. After two days they sent us an example in ‘XML’ which you cannot read easily without a program parser and is only about 20 stories. Obviously their professionalism leaves too much to be desired.
We have looked at Copley News, but all they carry is Editorials and very few news items.
Yellow brix is a content provider that deals with all the services and their smallest ’starter’ set is for 1,000 per month.
On the Web
The very nice people at Search Engine Guide.com added our article on their site to help with our plight.
http://www.searchengineguide.com/articles/2005/0323_rc1.htmlNews Story mentioning us
http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?section=business&id=2039A blog by me
http://internetherald.blogspot.com/Press releases;
http://www.free-press-release.com/news/200503/1111615465.html
If the article is correct, sounds like Google is being evil, punishing anybody who deals with AFP by not crawling any of their other stuff.
–
If you really think that AFP’s move will end up being disastrous to news sites, then it sounds to me like people have allowed Google to get too powerful to the point where people are walking on eggshells hoping to not offend the man.
Comment by Stu | March 24, 2005
How to commit suicide on the internet
Comment by alan herrell the head lemur | March 24, 2005