Making tough decisions

This year has been the worse for tough decisions.

For a few years I ran an online news publishing arm of my business, but from April this year Google effectively killed it, along with all the other small news publishers.

All because Google wanted to send Google News visitors to brand websites for news.

While I do have a strategy in play for epublishing to iPad/tablet PC, and still pressing for that on the best news sites for additional revenue streams, it does mean that I’ve had to:

- remove some writers
- cut hours on existing writers

This was all the more worse because most of my writing team has worked for my company for years, so having to tell them I was either having to let them go, or else cut hours, was one of the most horrible business decisions I’ve ever had to make.

However, as a business decision it was essential to cut costs when returns had plummeted to the point that for every £1 the news publishing earned, I was losing £3.

Still, I’m hopeful that the newly organised epublishing for tablets will work, but if not, I have other strategies in place.

Doesn’t mean to say I have to like it.

And especially galling that Google has built itself up into the market leading place it is now by taking content from webmasters and putting ads on it, yet is now on a mission to kill webmaster income in order to support big publishers.

Eric Schmidt has a view that brands are important to users, but big businesses are rarely, if ever, on the side of users.

And, more ironic, considering how much many major news publications have been trying to spam Google outright with scraped content and paid editorials for SEO purposes - while small webmasters are so fearful of upsetting Google because they know the risk of getting canned.

Yet Google canned us anyway.

Sometimes it really does not pay to play by the rules.