Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1640
- 1647)
WEDNESDAY 16 JANUARY 2008
Mr David Schlesinger, Mr Pierre Lesourd and Mr Tony
Watson
Q1640 Chairman:
But they do not pay you for that?
Mr Schlesinger: But the people who go to our
website then increase the value of our website to advertisers,
so we get paid by having more people come to our website.
Q1641 Lord Maxton:
So do you then pay them because some advertisers pay, so you are
getting it on Google or Yahoo, which are the two main pages when
people turn on the internet, so do you pay them to ensure that
your stories are there so that in fact you do get more customers?
Mr Watson: Google do pay us for our content.
Q1642 Lord Maxton:
Google pay you?
Mr Watson: Yes.
Q1643 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Do they always attribute the source to you, Google and Yahoo,
and will there be a link through?
Mr Schlesinger: Yes. Google has changed its
algorithm so that now they tend to go to the original source and
that helps us greatly. It used to be that, if people then subsequently
used our story, it might flow to them, but now it is much clearer
where the original source of the story was and that is very helpful.
Q1644 Chairman:
So Google pay PA, but they do not pay Reuters?
Mr Schlesinger: I honestly do not know all the
relationships. I know that we get a lot of click-throughs and
I know that the primary way in which we monitor that is through
people coming to our website.
Q1645 Chairman:
What about AFP?
Mr Lesourd: After a long legal battle of two
years, we now have the same agreement with Google as the Associated
Press and PA, and I think we are in the same framework agreement,
yes.
Q1646 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Did you have to pressurise them to change their algorithm or did
they do it off their own bat, Google?
Mr Schlesinger: I believe that they found it
useful for them to go to the originator because that gave them
more credibility.
Mr Watson: I think also, and they recognise
this themselves, they were misleading their users because of the
way their system works. If a largely PA story appeared, for example,
in The Daily Telegraph with a PA picture, the way in which
it credited that material when it appeared on Google News was
as a Telegraph article and picture. Well, it is more difficult
to copyright words, but pictures are very easy to track and they
recognised that they were inadvertently guilty of mis-crediting
content which actually belonged somewhere else.
Q1647 Baroness Thornton:
Do you not think that AFP actually did everybody a service by
taking two years out to sue Google in that it changed their behaviour
in the marketplace?
Mr Watson: It is always a judgment whether to
go to law or to strike a deal as the best way to go.
Chairman: Well, I think we will go further into
this no doubt at a slightly later stage. I think at this point
we have overrun our time, but thank you very much. It is obviously
the agencies which perhaps do not get as much coverage from outside
as some of the newspapers and the broadcasting organisations,
but you are obviously integral as far as news provision is concerned
and particularly crucial for foreign news as well. I would like
to thank all three of you very much for your patience and for
the information you have given. Thank you very much.
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