Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft and Google Won't Save Online (on the Web) News, They Will Squash It While Self-Detonating

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 14, 2023,
updated Nov 14, 2023

Microsoft is going down

msn.com

THE year was 2020 when Microsoft announced many layoffs at MSN, then spinning those layoffs as "replaced by HEY HI" (AI).

Earlier this year, especially last month, the same thing happened in Google News, quite frankly after it had already become a big pile of garbage (we did many long videos explaining and showing this in 2021 and early 2022, which was when we finally quit it).

The problem isn't just centralisation and censorship instead of proper curation. The problem is a lot bigger than that and it affects us because we do curate a lot of news (by hand). The sister site has done so for nearly 20 years and here in Techrights we've done this for over 15 years.

Social control media is rotting away, but that does not mean it gets replaced by portals. Portals predate things like Twitter and they lack appeal for many reasons. Their momentum or inertia is associated with preloading (bundling) and default settings. Why do people assume that Apple and MSN get traffic? Because people actually choose these? No.

One reader suggested we revisit an article published the other day under the title "Zombie news: the strange resurrection of the local paper" (the headline seems wrong as we've witnessed no such resurrection but rather the opposite*)."What's left of the news is being mopped up and removed," to quote the reader, and this seems like unbridled optimism:

On 8 November, journalists at the UK’s biggest commercial news publisher, Reach, joined a web meeting in which the company’s CEO, Jim Mullen, announced the latest wave of redundancies: 450 jobs would go, of which around 320 would be journalists. In what seems to have been a technical oversight, staff were able to comment on the livestream; as Mullen spoke, anonymous commenters asked why Mullen (whose experience lies mainly in the gambling industry) couldn’t spare some of his £4m salary, 174 times that of a typical reporter, and why his pay was so high when the company’s share price had fallen significantly. Another simply asked: “How long until we are all unemployed?”

[...]

Posing as a prospective advertiser, I asked PR Fire if it would be possible to run local politics stories on both sites. I stipulated that I would have to have complete control over the text and pictures in the stories, and that they would not be marked as advertising. To any editor, such a request should be taboo – but one of PR Fire’s directors guaranteed that my ads would run unedited, “not marked as sponsored or ad”, and that I would also have control over how the stories were presented on social media.

In further emails, another PR Fire employee described how the pieces would be syndicated by news aggregators. Because these aggregators regarded them as news, published by an editorial website, these paid-for articles would receive “guaranteed syndication to Google News, MarketWatch, Reuters, DowJones & LexisNexis”, they wrote, as well as to “reputable news sites” including Microsoft Network or MSN, which is, at 750 million visits per month, one of the biggest websites in the world. Being featured on a site like this costs an extra £200, and also helps advertisers to move their narratives further up in Google search results. “MSN will look like editorial,” one email assured me.

One catchy quote from the above: “How long until we are all unemployed?”

Well, they and others openly admitted earlier this month that relying too much on social control media (or outsourcing to it) was a serious mistake.

In the above, notice the inane mention of MSN; the "MSN" thing shows they're not being serious or realistic, not just because there will be no "comeback" (for either MSN or other "news portals", set aside Google News).

They foolishly repeat a Microsoft lie, asserting that MSN is "at 750 million visits per month, one of the biggest websites in the world."

According to who? Microsoft? MSN is not even a top site, traffic-wise. As per this firm, msn.com has less than 750 million compared to 3.6 billion on yahoo.com. MSN is moving down, not up, and on an international scale CNN is ranked higher than MSN (global rank is 51).

So basically, based on some poorly researched assertions and Microsoft propaganda they seem to have reached this idea or conclusion that reliance on Microsoft will somehow save them. Don't mind their mistakes; do the research.

_____
* The news from Finland (in Swedish) reaffirms the international nature of this issue. It should not be treated as a national issue but as an international issue, no matter the language.

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