The miseducation of Sam Zell

April 10, 2007
by Latitude

Property billionaire Sam Zell just spent some of his billions on a bundle of American newspapers. He may be clever enough to make big pots of cash, but Zell has astonishingly poor grasp on the basics of the web and search engines.

Sample quote:

If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be? Not very.

What is perhaps more disturbing is that the mainstream media outlet which reported his views did not see fit to research or correct Zell’s outrageous mistakes. Neither the howlers about how Google actually makes its money (the truth: from search) nor the outright erroneous statements about how search engines work went unchallenged in the Washington Post piece. Doc Searls responds to the newspaper’s failure to get the story right:

Google is not the Web. It’s a search engine. Big difference. Putting editorial on the Web is itself permission for anybody to read it, search it, index it, and link to it…If there is an advertising deal between some papers and Google, that is hardly the only reason those papers put editorial on the Web…The fact that Agence France-Press sued Google over alleged copyright-infringement shows that AFP is clueless as hell about the Web. And the fact that Google settled the suit with AFP says nothing about what the Web is or why news organizations would put their goods there.

He has this to say to Zell:

If you don’t want people to read editorial anywhere but on paper, don’t put it on the Web, or embed code that tells search engines not to index it. (Trust me, Google obeys it.) But don’t expect whatever you gain in paid-archive sales to exceed what you sacrifice in lost authority and advertising sales on exposed content. With locked-up archives, searches for subjects your papers have covered well will exclude results that will exclude that coverage. Your papers need to adapt to a world where readers look increasingly to the Web as the place to find useful editorial. If you must monetize your editorial online, make your Web practices reflect your paper ones: charge for the news and give away the olds. That and other advice can be found here.

It is frustrating to know that many people will put down the Washington Post piece and conclude that, because they read it in a big newspaper, it must be true that Google makes its money by ripping off newspapers. The truth - that search engines make money by helping other companies to make more money, in a way that is wonderfully unintrusive and engaging of users (read: customers) - is actually a much better, more interesting story. Perhaps someone at the Post should write it…and fact-check it before going to print.