Why the Hamburg Declaration missed it's aim
Hamburg, Sept 09th, 2009: The presence of publishing houses in Google’s search results is drastically lower than expected.
In the Hamburg Declaration, which was published in June 09, a conglomerate of 166 international publishing houses argued against economical exploitation of their content by search engine giant Google. Within those 166, 148 are german publishing houses.
This reason lead TRG (The Reach Group) to start an analysis of several millions of Google search queries.
A special focus here lay on the high-ranked entries of each particular search result, since visits and monetary value are measured almost exclusively in these entry lists.
To put more weight to the content of the Hamburg Declaration, TRG extracted all entries of the group of almost 1,000 subscriber domains from the given Google index, with the central question being how empty Google would be on its first ten search result pages if no entry with origin of the group of 148 german publishing houses were present any more?
The results, though, may appear suprising: Only about 5% of the Top Ten entries could be traced to the publishing houses’ origin. Or, to put it the other way round: 95% of all german search queries already do exclude publishing house-related content on page one. The economical value of publishing house-related content for Google appears to be minimal. And what might bring one back down to earth is the fact that most of the publishing house-related content is solely brand-connected and therefore does not contain very much monetary value. The start- and search-result pages of german GoogleNews (which is an important traffic source for publishing houses and other news-related service providers) are completely ad-free (at least, by now).
Google’s business concept, though, appears to be much less dependant on publishing houses than is suggested by the Hamburg Declaration.
“Compared to the recent findings concerning the importance of publishing houses, if one were to
remove such strong domains as Wikipedia from the Google Index, Google and its users would
lose more than 13% of top position entries. “
adds TRG’s CEO Christoph Burseg.
How vast the enormous unused potential really is can be seen, if one dares to take a closer look not on the search results but the percentage of subscriber domains of the Hamburg Declaration in the Google Index.
4% of german Google index entries are connected to the publishing houses’ domains, this being 250 times the number of pages indexed in Google by the german Wikipedia. Most of those entries, though, are covered way behind at the rear end of Google’s search result pages.
Google Europe’s CEO Philip Schindler puts this fact in his own words. In an interview done by the Manager Magazin on August 17, 2009 he states that it is not Google’s responsibility to help the publishing houses to develop their own digital business models. This and the visibility within the search results should be taken into the publishing houses’ own hands, says Schindler.
Business information:
TRG- The Reach Group is a young and fresh consultancy with special focal points on Online Marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) for Web- & Newssearch. Based in Hamburg and Berlin, TRG works for customers with a monthly total of several million visits per month (IVW-certified). In cooperation with our customers, TRG develops new ways of improving range of coverage, sustainability and profitability.
media contact:
Christoph Burseg
Telefon: 030 - 920 383 3300
E-Mail: presse@thereachgroup.de
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