What The Associated Press is saying to Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo
“I’m not saying Google’s an enemy, all right?” the chief executive of The Associated Press, Tom Curley, was telling a few people in Hong Kong on Tuesday. “I’m saying they were brilliant, and we didn’t, collectively, license as aggressively as we could have. So now there’s this moment, and the two of them are competing.” He meant Google and Microsoft. “So where does that take us?”
Where, indeed. Since its annual meeting in April, the AP has been vocal, if not precise, about taking a harder line and negotiating better terms with unnamed “portals” that pay to distribute the consortium’s content. He made a similarly vague reference in a speech today at the Xinhua Beijing Media Summit. But in comments earlier this week, Curley was far more specific than ever before about the portals AP is talking to, the nature of those negotiations, and what he really thinks about Google.
“I think we stand at an enviable moment where Microsoft and Google have decided to go to war, and we who produce content can start to figure out whether there’s an opportunity for us to help that sharing in a way that reverses the outflow of money from media and takes it back,” he told an audience of journalists at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. That much has been reported.
But afterwards, chatting with a few attendees, Curley said he was negotiating a new partnership with Microsoft under conditions more favorable to the AP and its members. It was all captured in an audio recording provided to me by a reader. Here’s Curley:
We are only going to work with those who use our principles. We are not going to work with everybody. So if you don’t agree to our protocols, if you don’t agree to give us real-time metrics, we aren’t going to work with you. So when I sat down in the portal negotiations, you know, I said, this time is different. You have got to be able to give us the metrics. This is not about money. We’ll get to the money part of the conversation later. If you want our content, these are the things you have to do. And that’s what I outlined. If you can’t do that, or if you won’t do that, let’s not waste time. And so far, everybody’s doing technical due diligence, including us.
One of those “principles” to which Curley referred is privileging the original source of news over outlets that merely report what’s being reported elsewhere. (It’s worth noting the AP does a lot of aggregation itself, but the point here would be to include its members and point readers to wherever the story originated.) In addition to “real-time metrics,” they’re also expecting partners to support the AP’s system for tracking use of its content along with other “protocols” I wrote about at length in August.
Someone asked Curley if Microsoft was willing to accept the AP’s demands. “They have said very strongly that they would,” Curley responded. A bit earlier, he said of Microsoft, “They know how to have a conversation.” And what about Google? “I’m not talking about Google,” he said. “We haven’t talked. We haven’t talked. We haven’t talked with them in any serious way.”
That was a bit of a stunner for those of us who have assumed the AP was actively renegotiating its contract with Google, which has a license to publish AP stories. It was also notable because Curley and other AP executives had previously gone out of their way to avoid naming names. Not so in Hong Kong.
“The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of the late ’90s came and basically enabled Google and the Google wannabes to do what they are doing,” he told the audience, speaking without a prepared text, “and it’s time for us to take back the night.” (That was an unfortunate, though I’m sure unintentional, reference.) He also said this:
If you go on to Google, normally the top 10, of the top 10 items appearing on Google, 9 of the top 10 will be part of a Google self-referring network. Everything in there is linked to some other part of Google. It’s really a brilliant business approach, and God bless them. And all that money has come to them, all 22 billion. Folks, they can share.
Curely didn’t explain what he meant by Google’s “self-referring network,” but he made repeated reference to it and said the AP was planning “our own self-referring network.” That could have something to do with the AP’s plans for topic pages to rival Wikipedia in search results. After his speech, Curley added, “The programs that we’re undertaking, we expect Google to have a directly competitive response.”
As for Microsoft, Curley repeatedly insinuated a looming partnership that would extend beyond the existing license to distribute AP content. He teased a new Microsoft product (other hints here) that might be part of the deal:
The search war is going to be fought on a qualitative dimension. So Google famously has the ten blue lines, and then everybody else is going toward more visual and what they believe is more accurate. So EveryZing is all visual, all right, and Microsoft this month has some new technology that it’s unveiling that will be much more visually dramatic than anything you’ve seen before. Multimedia in ways you haven’t thought about yet. We’ve seen it, we’ve seen the technology.
If Microsoft and the AP come to terms, it could have huge implications for consumers and publishers, affecting some of the biggest news sites on the web: MSN and, given their search partnership, Yahoo News. (Curley had nice things to say about the AP’s experimental partnership with Yahoo for its coverage of Justice Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings.) This is the search engine — or, really, search partnership — that AP executives have been hinting at, the one that would privilege “the original source or the most authoritative source” of news. At AP, it’s called the News Registry.
Google, for what it’s worth, says that it already favors original sources, but it’s hard to imagine they’d agree to make any adjustments to search results specifically for the AP and its members. That could lead to some brinksmanship in which the AP hitches its wagon to Microsoft and hopes the company is successful in its renewed competition with Google. Or the AP and Google could finally start talking.
I’m still putting together the transcript of Curley’s remarks and will share that with some of the audio when it’s ready. (I made a call to the AP’s press office shortly before posting this and will update if there’s anything to add. UPDATE, 1:58 p.m.: Paul Colford, director of media relations for the AP, said he would let Curley’s presentation “speak for itself” but gave me this statement for context: “As discussed this week by AP President and CEO Tom Curley in Hong Kong, the AP news registry, announced in April and now in development, will greatly improve and quicken the discovery of authoritative news produced by the AP and its member news organizations and empower them to better serve their readers and customers.”)
These are just clues, and Curley was intentionally vague at points, but they’re bigger and clearer clues than we’ve previously heard from the AP.
Amazing blindness and stupidity, under a camouflage of the mighty (mighty alike) facade of AssPress.
Not only Curley makes really insane suggestions about the reaction of the end consumers but he’s greatly mistaken on how the mainstream media will react.
Twitter is 100 times faster, better, for the really good breaking news ( plane landing in Hudson river, Iran, etc. ).
AP just doesn’t get it’s obsolete, irrelevant.
Google doesn’t have a portal (like MSN) that wants to host AP’s content, so I’m not surprised that Google’s not having deeper discussions with them on this.
I’m sure there are discussions going on with Google, though. If he’s not personally had them, someone at the AP is. But Google could easily say thanks, no thanks, sue us if you think showing summaries and links is a violation. The hosted AP stories, to my understanding, is something the AP wanted from Google — not something that Google cares about having.
All this continues to make me think (or be scared) of just how fundamentally off the AP seems to be at the highest level. That they just don’t get how Google operates, that it cares to point out (not in).
Moreover, hey — I know Microsoft’s search technology as well if not better than Curley. If he’s drinking the koolaide that they’re going to blow Google away with some new tech, he’s in for a rude awakening. Geez, visual? You mean like SearchMe which went offline (with no one noticing)?
As for the self-referential part, he’s probably alluding to the fact that many pages you go to from Google carry Google AdSense, even if Google doesn’t host them.
If Google’s coming newspaper subscription model is as successful as it has the potential to be, is the AP even needed anymore?
Thanks for the insight, Danny, and I really liked your deconstruction of the Curley and Murdoch speeches today. It does seem like the AP has very little leverage with Google, so it will be fascinating to see if AP blinks or not. Also, glad to hear the self-referring loop is not some cosmic abyss or something. Your explanation meshes with what I’ve heard elsewhere. —Zach
Implicit in Curley’s assertion is the self-conferred entitlement that AP and other agencies are the only ones who create worthwhile content. If he had looked around he would find that quite a bit of the 22 billion USD came to Google not from running ads on those stories, they come from all kinds of content. Does AP want Google to pay them for ads placed near captioned cat pictures too? This is practically turning in to a stick-’em-up by the AP, who have an enabler in Murdoch.
If destination sites start doing what AP is asking them to do — to send traffic for exclusives back to AP — is preposterous. Why on earth would anyone do that? As Danny has pointed out, the scary part is that they believe in these fundamentally flawed ideas at the topmost level. A bit more of hysteria of the same manner, and they’d very soon start resembling cultists.
If they are serious about being a destination site as a primary objective, then every subscriber of theirs will renegotiate with them or cut off their subscriptions. And it is not like being a successful destination site for news guarantees your financial well being. They’ll just wind up in a pool of publications who are already struggling to do the same.
Google DOES have a self-referring network. That is how they have inflated their page views over the page views that Microsoft and Yahoo! generate from search.
The search industry today is, unfortunately, measured on the basis of those page views rather than on the basis of how much traffic the search engines actually send to other sites.
I’m not saying the Associated Press and News Corp have the right idea in mind — I will be the last person to pay a subscription for news — but many of the criticisms he is reportedly making in the citations you provide are valid.
I think we are all a little excited to see what Bing’s plans are now to really pull in market share.
It’s fascinating to note that the first remarks always come from the haters. (“blindness, stupidity” etc)
Do they really think that Google is going to spend the money digging up news, verifying it and taking the risks that come with independence?
Save your hot air. You’re going to need it when there’s no one with the resources and attention span to expose something as complex as the S.W.I.F.T. bank surveillance, the eastern european gulags…etc.
Many want to say they can do news.
Few want to pay the dues.
People who cherish their freedom should be hoping against hope that AP will succeed.
Any organization, like Google, that lives to lap up metrics will be severely handicapped in its ability to ignore the market.
AP isn’t perfect, but at least the culture at AP has more to do with public service than monetizing algorithmic foci…
Now Google has quite a bit of cash floating around and could easily assemble it’s own news gathering operation quite handily. What would AP do if Google were to assemble such an organization then pull a “Walmart” by under charging for the aggregated content thereby pulling AP’s membership base away from them and effectively putting them out of business? Mr. Curley is playing a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse and given Google’s proven internet and business acumen and Microsoft’s equally relevant missteps (ME, Zune, Vista, etc.) which team would you bet on to succeed — a savvy Google news and business powerhouse or a brazen yet shaky AP/Microsoft news venture with as much (or more) potential for failure as it has for success? It’s a wild world out there and Google has been on top for quite awhile now. My advice to AP would be to hold your well intentioned plans a little closer to the vest for now because Google is likely already planning to counter attack. Another potential issue for AP is it’s “not for profit” status which may be called into question by federal regulators if their alliance with Microsoft proves to be as profitable as they hope it would be. Google would no doubt push that hot button with anti-trust regulators at a time of their liking (presumably as the competition between AP/Microsoft and Google starts to really heat up). All of this is naturally conjecture at this point but Google has proven to be a sturdy competitor in the past and would presumably take off the kid gloves if an all out news conglomerate battle were to erupt between themselves and any organization.