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Save the 4. Force

Today a somewhat thoughtful article. The Frankfurter Rundschau has gone bust. Not that this would particularly bother me, I found the design ugly from an early on with the green, etc… But it shows a trend: the Frankfurter Rundschau did not go on the Internet, was not a celebrity. That's why she had to fall. But is the Internet the universal solution for journalism, for the press, the fourth force in the country, the fourth force of the separation of powers?

So that with the Frankfurter Rundschau touched me so much because it belonged to the DuMont publishing house, for which my father, my mother and my grandpa worked, as journalists at the Kölner Stadtanzeiger. The @fischblog, his sign editor at Spektrum – Verlag, also speaks of a crisis in the print media. But the exodus of readers to the online media can be paid for at all.

I make with my absolute theory 1 cent per reader through AdSense, of course not everyone clicks, but the cut is a penny, I have 1000 readers a month when it comes up. I don't really care, I have a permanent job as a programmer, and writing is just my hobby. But if you extrapolate that, one cent per reader, then a newspaper with a circulation of 150,000 readers has, which I now naively equate with 150,000 readers on the Internet, just a daily budget of 1,500€. Everyone buys the newspaper for 1 cent instead of 50 cents or 1€. Of course, you can accuse my site of pseudo-theory, or that I don't cleverly place the ads, don't bet on the right keywords, whatever. 1,500 euros a day makes 45,000 euros a month, and you don't pay 500 people like the Frankfurter Rundschau. With this, if you still do advertising, you can afford only 4 or 5 people.

Yes, German politicians are crying out for the Performance Protection Act, which is supposed to channel money from Google to the newspapers. That the nonsense is in the execution is clear to everyone. I call the search engine as a taxi to promote my content and then shout "help, kidnap" when it does the same. Google, as I estimate it, is pure market economy, adwords and adsense prices are calculated purely in terms of market economy.

Nevertheless, no newspaper can live on it, as I have just calculated a little amateurishly. Google certainly has an economist who has to come up with a solution. The fact is that newspapers and journalists, who used to live better from their print advertising, may have been able to live too well. But the solution can only come from Google, they should think about how to replace this profane performance protection right, which must of course be rejected, with a sensible advertising pricing model.

Just my two cents

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