Q&A: Madhav Chinnappa, Director of News Ecosystems @ Google
This week, The Idea caught up with Madhav Chinnappa, Director of News Ecosystems at Google. We talked about his path to Google, Google’s approach to partnering with publishers, and what people get wrong about Google and news.
Tell us about what you do and how you got there.
I joined Google about eight years ago. Before Google, I worked at the BBC, and before that I helped start up the TV side of the Associated Press and worked in various different roles there, including on the news desk.
Then I moved across to the BBC, and I had a role there as head of rights and development at BBC News. Part of my job was dealing with all of the relationships that the BBC had, with both news agencies, where I used to come from, and also broadcasters.
And that’s how I got to interact with Google. Back then I used to say two things to Google: 1) I don’t think you get news, and 2) when you do, you only do stuff with The New York Times and The Washington Post.
And then I got a call from someone who I used to kind of jokingly complain to about Google and he said, all those things you’re talking about, we’re actually hiring a role to try and work on them. So I became the first news products partnerships person based in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) and worked on a bunch of things, including Google News.
In the last three or four years, I worked on DNI (Digital News Initiative), which worked around product, training and research, and innovation. Then I got involved on the GNI (Google News Initiative) side when we launched GNI in March of last year. At the end of last year, I actually got a more global role reporting to Richard Gingras, VP of news at Google, [Editor’s note: Read our interview with him here] working on our ecosystem initiatives.
Remind us what GNI is?
GNI has three overarching goals: one is about evolving business models, the second is about elevating quality journalism, and the third is about empowering journalism through technology.
Some of the things I get involved in are around what the product dialogue and relationships are that we can have to execute against those goals. For example, our big push into helping with subscriptions has come out of a product dialogue that actually started under DNI and has been continued under GNI, which has led to Subscribe with Google and the developments of that.
We try to have a lot of forums, whether they’re working groups around specific issues, or working groups more broadly, where we can actually have a dialogue with publishers. The canonical example of that from my previous role at DNI was actually AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages.)
What happened with AMP is that publishers said that one of their big issues was mobile (they said it was mostly three — mobile, video, and monetization.)
On mobile they said, at the time, we’re having all these different platforms come to us and say give us a feed of your content, and they each have different business rules — whether that was Instant Articles, or Snapchat Discover, or Apple News, or even Google Play Newsstand. They said it’s a bit difficult, help.
The engineers on our side looked at that situation and they diagnosed the problem. They said well the problem is, that the mobile web is too slow. That’s not a problem Google can solve. This is an ecosystem issue.
And that’s where they developed AMP as an open source initiative that everyone is part of and nobody owns. It was a really interesting process because I think a bunch of different surprises happened. One, when we came back to the working group, with the AMP HTML, one of the publishers actually said, I thought you’d come up with your version of Instant Articles. The engineer was like, well that wouldn’t have solved your problem. I think from the Google side, what we realized is that this dialogue helps build better products much faster and with much faster adoption.
So what does your role look like within that now?
What I’m trying to do is to establish the global channels for dialogue and collaboration. This may sound a bit cheesy, but I think it’s important that we get the right process in place and then the outcomes will deliver from there and not put the outcome first. And that’s I think the lesson we learned from AMP overall, which was, let’s have that dialogue and that process and then we get to a really good outcome. That’s one of the things that I’m trying to work on is those product working group dialogues that we have.
The second thing that I’m working on is very much our innovation challenges framework. We want to stimulate innovation globally; this is an easy line to say and hard to deliver on.
We’re working out a program that we’re going to roll out globally. We started in Asia where we’re doing an Innovation Challenge around reader revenue. We want to be very focused on the topic and focused on what’s right for the region. So we had a dialogue with publishers in the region and all of the Google folks in the region as well, and said what is the challenge, if you’re going to stimulate innovation, and what is the topic that you should be doing it around.
My assessment of what’s going on globally around subscriptions is that in North America, the sense is, “We need to do this, we’re on the way.” In Europe, the sense is, “We need to do this,” and they’re starting that journey. In Asia, the sense is, “We probably should do this, we don’t know how to start just yet.” So that’s why we picked reader revenue as the thing to try and stimulate innovation around.
The third side is to also be out there publicly and to get our message across, because I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about what Google does and I think we can always improve on our outreach into the ecosystem.
Why does Google care about helping publishers?
Google cares for two main reasons. One, there’s a principle in the values that we have, which are very common to the news industry, and the second is a business one.
On the principle side, we are a child of the web, as my boss likes to say. And therefore the health of the open ecosystem is important to us from a principle perspective.
But it’s also important to us from a business perspective. We’re an ecosystem company. If you look at the businesses that we have that touch on the publisher world, they’re all revenue share-based. If you looked at our ad technology, it’s revenue share-based. We only make money when publishers make money. It’s the same with YouTube, and we share the revenue.
So the overall health of the ecosystem is good for our business, but also good for the principles we believe in around access to information, which makes for a healthier society as well. That’s why we care about the sustainability of the news ecosystem overall.
What are some of the communication channels you’ve set up to interact with publishers?
Different parts of Google talk to different parts of publishers all the time. We’ve got lots of businesses that do that, whether that’s YouTube, our ad tech businesses, cloud, etc.
What we’re trying to do on top of that with GNI is both regional dialogues and product-based dialogues. For example, we have a series of working groups around products and issues. So we have one around AMP, we have a subscriptions working group, we have one around audio, as well.
And then we have, and what we’re rolling out, is regional groups where people can get together, because though individual countries and regions are very different, publishers are different, sometimes you do get common themes coming from regions. So we want to get the voice of the regions there.
That’s been really important for me, because that was my original joking complaint about Google, which is that they always do stuff with The New York Times and Washington Post. We’re a global company, so I want to make sure we’re hearing those voices globally. I think there’s a lot more that we can do in that space.
Is there anything else that’s come out of that working group?
Yes. The other thing that we got from the working group is that it’s not just about subscriptions. It’s also about donations. Paying for access to content is one piece of the puzzle, but there are a lot of publishers, like the Guardian, that have donations as a big part of their model. That actually is a different type of fish, and a different kind of product and product set that you need to develop out of that.
The other thing that has come out of the working group, and we’re still at alpha stage on this, is something called propensity to subscribe — which is, are there signals, in a completely privacy-centric way, that we can send to publishers to say this person has a greater propensity to subscribe.
It’s safe to say we’re on a “learning journey.” We’re learning as we go with the alpha partners that we’re working with. Some of the early signs are pretty good, but we’ve got a long ways to go. If you’re someone like the New York Times or the FT and you’ve been doing this for over a decade, you’re far ahead in that in terms of where we are.
What do people misunderstand Google and news?
The biggest misunderstanding that I had coming from the news industry into Google was that I didn’t actually understand Google’s business model — I actually had to seek this out.
The meme that bugs me is this whole thing about 85 cents of every digital dollar goes to Google and Facebook. The insinuation behind that is that there’s money that’s being taken from publishers that’s going to Google.
I think if you look at Google’s business, there are two parts — there’s the “Search as” business, which is very much a different business from display advertising, which is core to publishers. In that space, Google only makes money when publishers make money. We’re incentivized to help in that space because it’s part of our business.
Those numbers that are out there actually conflate two different markets and then also don’t show the whole revenue share piece. On our ad tech tools, the rev share normally starts at 70% to the publisher and goes up. The thing that I wish that people understood more is the value that we put back into the ecosystem.
I think we do it in two big ways, both I feel are undervalued by the industry. One is through our ad tech tools and the revenue that we help power. And the other is traffic. Traffic has a value, and that’s why everyone invests in SEO, and whenever they talk to anyone from Google they’ll complain they don’t get enough traffic. Because that traffic actually has value. And that’s a really important thing. We’re a search engine — we’re about sending traffic and we think that’s a good thing.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve seen recently from a media outlet other than your own?
One of the things that I really like is the FT’s quizzes in their newsletter. I feel like, since I’m a news guy, I should be on top of the news. And then I take that quiz and I can’t get above a 5/10. It’s a really interesting way of engaging with me.
The other one that I saw recently that I thought was a really great digital piece was the one that BBC Africa did on the Nairobi hotel attacks. A horrible story. But they used survivor interviews, 3-D modeling, and actually told you the story of how that attack took place. It was an amazing piece of storytelling and incredibly engaging.
