“In a world in which you’re flooded with like lot of content …if anything, something like search becomes more valuable. In a world in which you’re inundated with content, you’re trying to find trustworthy content, content that makes sense to you in a way reliably you can use it, I think it becomes more valuable.
To your previous part about there’s a lot of information out there, people are getting it in many different ways. Look, information is the essence of humanity. We’ve been on a curve on information… when Facebook came around, people had an entirely new way of getting information, YouTube, Facebook, Tik… I can keep going on and on.
…I think the problem with a lot of those constructs is they are zero sum in their inherent outlook. They just feel like people are consuming information in a certain limited way and people are all dividing that up. But that’s not the reality of what people are doing. “
Pichai Stumbles On Question About Impact On Creators
The interviewer next asked if content is being devalued. He used the example of someone who researches a topic for a book, reads twenty books, cites those sources in the bibliography and then gets it published. Whereas Google ingests everything and then “spits” out content all day long, defeating the human who in earlier times would write a book.
Andrew Ross Sorkin said:
“You get to spit it out a million times. A million times a day. And I just wonder what the economics of that should be for the folks that create it in the beginning.”
Sundar Pichai defended Google by saying that Google spends a lot of time thinking about the impact to the “ecosystem” of publishers and how much traffic it sends to them. The interviewer listened to Sundar’s answer without mentioning the elephant in the room, search results stuffed with Reddit and advertising that crowds out content created by actual experts, and the de-prioritization of news content which has negatively impacted traffic to news organizations around the world.
It was at this point that Pichai appeared to stumble as he tried to find the words to respond. He avoids mentioning websites, speaking in the abstract about the “ecosystem” and then when he runs out of things to say changes course and begins speaking about how Google compensates copyright holders who sign up for YouTube’s Content ID program.
He answered:
“Look I… uh… It’s a… very important question… uhm… look I… I… think… I think more than any other company… look you know… we for a long time through… you know… be it in search making sure… while it’s often debated, we spend a lot of time thinking about the traffic we send to the ecosystem.
Even through the moment through the transition over the past couple of years. It’s an important priority for us.”
At this point he started talking about Google’s content platform YouTube and how they use “Content ID” which is used to identify copyright-protected content. Content ID is a program that benefits the corporate music, film, and television industries, copyright owners who “own exclusive rights to a substantial body of original material that is frequently uploaded to YouTube.”
Pichai continued:
“In YouTube we put a lot of effort into understanding and you know identifying content and with content ID and uh creating monetization for creators.
I think… I think those are important principles, right. I think um… there’s always going to be a balance between understanding what is fair use uh… when new technology comes versus how do you… give value back proportionate to the value of the IP, the hard work people have put in.”
Insightful Interview Of Alphabet’s CEO
The interviewer did a great job at asking the hard questions but I think many in the search marketing community who are more familiar with the search results would have asked follow up questions about content creators who are not on Google’s YouTube platform or the non-expert content that pushes down content by actual experts.
Watch the New York Times Interview here:
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Shutterstock AI Generator
(no irony intended)