iPad media apps: Stealthed hobbits thwart Google's flaming Eye
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Opinion Tablet media applications have a Google invisibility cloak around their stories. As this spreads a deadly revenue-denying dart could penetrate Google's media business model.
'There is no hope in the void'
The worldwide web is wide open, and Google takes full advantage of that, indexing everything it can find and providing access to it. Online media has followed the web model, with hypertext links from articles to sources and companion stories. The Reg is typical of this.
The Huffington Post website, a free-to-access news media site funded by adverts on the pages, follows this model. But, crucially, the iPad Huffington Post app is not available on the web. You can't download the app to a Windows and Mac PCs and notebooks.
Contrast the same story in the iPad HuffPo and the web HuffPo. The web version has a host of "read more" links below the headline; the iPad one doesn't. The web version has classic blue hot links in the story text to other HuffPo stories. The iPad HuffPo uses bold text to do the same job... But you are not reading the iPad HuffPo with a browser; it's an iPad App – with browser-like forwards and backwards navigation – but the links are at the App's discretion.
The content inside the iPad HuffPo is invisible to Google; it's in a black hole that Google's web-crawling spiders can't penetrate. Let's generalise. All the content in media implemented as tablet and smartphone apps will be invisible to Google and other search engines. As long as there is a website equivalent of the tablet/smartphone media apps, that won't matter, but how long will this fragile state of affairs continue?
For any media site the idea of a media app, comfortingly confining its users behind velvet curtains in a cleanly-designed and clutter-free environment and with an oh-so-easy possible transition to a subscription business model must look enormously attractive. Your content is exclusive because it is simply not seen by web aggregators and search engines. No bozo aggregators can syphon off your users. You can discreetly add adverts if you wish and get paid for those too.
Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page must be looking at this phenomenon and seeing the potential of a dark curtain being pulled across the wide open worldwide web they have been free to pillage for a decade. That curtain will close off parts of the online content world to Google, and hence restrict Google's ability to serve up ads to users guided to media sites by Google. Will that cause Googleplexers to quake in their boots?
Imagine a Facebook app, a LinkedIn app, and a web world of fleeing newspaper sites as they transform into newspaper tablet apps and vanish from the Google radar. Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search sites and news aggregation sites will get the equivalent of macular degeneration; their web field of view will constrict more and more, affecting their revenue and business models from the media indexing point of view.
There's more. Have you heard about Mac Apps? Could we conceive of the HuffPo as a Mac App, available to Mac OS desktop and notebook users? Suddenly a tablet app-based denial of web search service attack on search engines would spread to Apple notebooks and desktops. Would the now imitative Microsoft let Windows get left behind? No way, Jose. The widespread adoption of media-as-apps on all consumer computing platforms might almost be seen as inevitable.
I foresee a fracture of the all-embracing worldwide web here. The online media world mostly overlaps the worldwide web now, apart from the tablet app niche. But that niche is the very thin end of what could be a huge wedge. The proliferation of apps could deny the search giant its vital revenue and drive a stake right into the heart of its media business model. ®
COMMENTS
Yay, unsearchable data!
If you can't hide subscriber-only content from unauthorised third parties without having to write an iwhatever application, you already have some pretty serious issues. It isn't rocket science.
Allowing search engine spiders to see an abstract of an article's content with an associated 'subscribe here!' link is a non uncommon solution either; various academic paper repositories and journals take this approach.
By hiding all your data, no-one is going to know what they're missing, so its going to be trickier to pick up a wider audience. You're also require your own search engine for your archives and most people seem utterly inept at doing such things compared to google's reasonably slick offering.
This article makes no sense.
Google respects a robots.txt file. Maybe the huffington post uses one for those elements of their website?
http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html#code
Yeah, If I have a file called 'robots.txt' and it tells Google to go away, then Google will not index my site.
This isn't new.
Death of the open internet?
The increasing fragmentation of the internet has been predicted for a while, but it seems to be coming more prominent in mainstream media (particularly with Vaizey's comments about a potentially tiered internet & the net neutrality debate in the US). Even the Daily Mail website carried an item in Michael Hanlon's science blog about this very issue. Hopefully this will make the public more aware of the issues. To be honest people take the internet's openess for granted & I hate to think it that it will disappear as we know it.
However, I think the internet has many enemies who hate that very openess. The US pays lip service to freedom of the web, but when something like Wikileaks happens they must rue its Wild West nature. Plus there's all those viruses, spam emails, scams, hackers, etc. that thrive because of that openess. There's all that smut out there that outrages many sensibilities. There's China & Iran & all the other authoritarian states who also hate the access to information the internet allows. There's big business that wants to turn the internet into the equivalent of cable TV (where they control what you watch) & tether you to certain devices & applications. There's all the media websites who regret giving away their content for free. There's all the record companies who don't like the downloading of their music.
Certainly the internet is a chaotic place & perhaps more control is a necessary evil. However it would be a terrible shame if the ability to go to any website with whatever device you choose is increasingly restricted. But an open internet is something that many groups despise.
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