Macron: Google can't escape copyright laws

Google cannot escape French law obliging the US online giant to pay royalties to media outlets for displaying their articles, pictures and videos in search results, French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday.

Google routinely shows extracts of news articles or small "thumbnail" images in its results and on Google News, without paying the publishers.

A new EU rule, which France is the first to implement, requires internet companies to pay for such content.

Google has baulked, saying it will not use the content in search results unless publishers make it available for free.

But Macron criticized Google's operations in France and Germany and said that "the desire of an operator today is not to pay the newspaper, not to pay the journalists". 

"A company, even a very large company, can not get away with it when it decides to operate in France," the French president insisted, during a visit to mark the centenary of the La Montagne newspaper in the city of Clermont-Ferrand in central France.

"We are going to start implementing the law," he said.

The new European legislation, which comes into force on October 24, seeks to ensure media firms are paid for original content displayed by Google, Facebook and other technology giants which dominate the online advertising market.

The new rules create "neighboring rights" to ensure a form of copyright protection -- and compensation -- for media firms when their content is used on websites such as search engines.

However on September 25, Google said it had no intention of paying European media outlets. 

"It's up to the publishers to decide how they promote their content," Richard Gingras, Google's vice president in charge of news, told journalists in Paris then, after meeting French Culture Minister Franck Riester. 

At Google, he added, "we don't pay for links to be included in search results" because "it would undermine the trust of users".

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Facebook in talks with publishers on news effort: sources

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is pitching a new media initiative to license articles from some of the largest American news publishers and display that content inside the social network’s mobile app, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.

The project involves the social network striking deals potentially worth millions of dollars to publishers including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Dow Jones, parent company of The Wall Street Journal, among others, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The agreements would let Facebook pull in headlines and previews of the articles from partner publications for display inside a “News” tab in the Facebook app, they said. The talks with news organizations are continuing, they added, and it is unclear if any deals are close. Facebook hopes to introduce the effort by the end of the year.

Representatives for Dow Jones, The Times and The Post declined to comment. A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed that the company was aiming to include a “News” tab inside its app by the end of the year, but declined to comment further. News of the talks was first reported by The Journal.

Facebook’s pitch is the latest move by a major tech platform into the digital news and entertainment space, as companies vie for people’s attention. In a partnership with publishers, Google has developed Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, to load articles faster on smartphones. Snapchat has also locked in revenue-sharing deals with publishers on its “Discover” tab inside its app.

In the past, Facebook secured deals with publishers — including The Times — that sucked entire articles into its app for them to load faster and provide what the company called a “better user experience.” But that project, called Instant Articles, fizzled shortly after its debut.

As Silicon Valley players have continued courting the news business, publishers have grown wary for fear of tech companies’ luring audience loyalty away from publishers’ sites.

Facebook is trying to differentiate its new product from past offerings. In its pitch, the company said its “News” tab would not display the main text of articles inside Facebook’s app. Instead, it would link to publishers’ sites or apps and direct users elsewhere to read whole articles, the people familiar with the plans said.

That has proved more enticing to some publishers than a deal proposed by Apple this year. The Apple News app, which costs subscribers $10 a month, pulls in entire articles from partner publishers, which include Vice Media and New York magazine. Apple takes half the overall revenue, while the publishers split the remaining 50 percent, paid to each outlet on a per-view basis.

Publishers including The Journal joined the Apple News effort. Others, like The Times and The Post, declined.

“We tend to be quite leery about the idea of almost habituating people to find our journalism somewhere else,” Mark Thompson, chief executive of The New York Times Co., told Reuters in an interview this year. “We’re also generically worried about our journalism being scrambled in a kind of Magimix with everyone else’s journalism.”


2019 The New York Times Company

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Google working on policy to restrict ads on fake news sites

Alphabet Inc.'s Google said on Monday it was working on a policy update to restrict its ads from being placed on fake news sites as concerns mount about the rapid spread of inaccurate information online.

The policy change is imminent, Google spokeswoman Andrea Faville told Reuters.

"Moving forward, we will restrict ad serving on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher's content, or the primary purpose of the web property," she said in a statement.

The policy change comes amid an intensifying debate over how much responsibility technology companies bear for monitoring the accuracy of content as more and more people access news through sites such as Facebook rather than traditional media companies.

Facebook, in particular, has been criticized over the spread of inaccurate articles promoting US president-elect Donald Trump on the site. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has denied that the site influenced the outcome of the election.

Google's AdSense advertising network is a key financial driver for many publishers. The company places various restrictions on where its ads may be placed, including bans on pornographic and violent content. Work on the policy update began before the election, Faville said.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

ABS-CBNnews.com is Facebook's 6th biggest publisher

103.3 million pageviews, 53.49 million visits, 16.46 million unique browsers in July

MANILA – ABS-CBNnews.com rose to 6th place among the world's biggest publishers on Facebook in July 2014, according to news aggregator NewsWhip.

ABS-CBNnews.com was ahead of other global news companies such as The New York Times, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, the Washington Post, and others.

ABS-CBNnews.com is also the lone Philippine and Asian website on the list.

"The biggest gains came from the Philippine news site ABS CBN, which attracted over 11.5m interactions last month, up from 8.6m in June," NewsWhip's latest report said.

ABS-CBNnews.com climbed one notch in the latest rankings, from 7th place in May 2014.

ABS-CBN Corporation's news website has more than 5.48 million followers on Facebook, the largest among all news websites in the Philippines.

The top 10 publishers on Facebook, as of July 2014, are: huffingtonpost.com, buzzfeed.com, foxnews.com, nbc.com, ijreview.com, abs-cbnnews.com, theguardian.com, nytimes.com, dailymail.co.uk, and bleacherreport.com.






TOP PHILIPPINE NEWS WEBSITE

ABS-CBNnews.com also remains as the top Philippine news website in unique browsers, unique visitors, visits, and pageviews.

It set an all-time high of more than 100 million pageviews for the month of July.

Almost a million users visit the ABS-CBNnews.com website daily, translated into an average of 3 million pageviews a day, according to data from Effective Measure (EM), the common provider of audience measurement analytics of Philippine online publishers.

For the Philippine audience alone, ABS-CBNnews.com recorded more than 8.9 million unique browsers, more than 25.6 million visits, and more than 44.8 million pageviews in July.

For the worldwide audience, ABS-CBNnews.com had more than 16.46 million unique browsers, 53.49 million visits, and 103.3 million pageviews for the month.

Second-placed GMA Network, in comparison, had 47.9 million total pageviews, 23.7 million visits, and 10.1 million unique browsers.

Ranking by unique browsers is deemed important because EM assigns a unique cookie ID to a viewer's web browser (or device) when the person visits an EM-audited site, drawing data to an almost 1-viewer-to-1 web browser or device.

Only EM subscribers are shown in its analytics reports.

ABS-CBNnews.com's stats for July are the highest recorded for a month by any Philippines news site.

 Separate data from Comscore, an American Internet analytics company, also shows ABS-CBNnews.com ahead of other local news websites with regard to the number of unique visitors from the Philippines in June 2014.

ABS-CBNnews.com's YouTube channel is also the most-subscribed in Southeast Asia with almost 1.8 million subscribers and more than 500 million views as of August 4, 2014.

More than 2.3 million people also follow ABS-CBNnews.com's accounts on Twitter.

Nearly 50% of ABS-CBNnews.com's visitors are in the Philippines, with the rest from North America, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Europe.

More than 62% of ABS-CBNnews.com's audience access the website through their mobile devices.

Around 379,000 people have installed ABS-CBNnews.com's mobile iOS app, and almost 362,000 are using its Android app version.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Google Explains Blogger Outage

Blogger is one of the most popular blogging platforms and it's a free blogging service owned by Google. Recently, the company suffered an outage -Thursday May 12 and was down all day until the service was finally restored and returned to normal- Friday morning of May 13.

Millions of blog publishers using Google Blogger were affected including myself. We received an error message along with an apology for the inconvenience and publishers were unable to post to Blogger.


Blogger Tech Manager Eddie Kessler said in a post on the Blogger Buzz blog. "We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain". Eddie Kessler made an apology and explanation.