At some point, we've all said no to an offer of help before realizing that some help would actually be rather useful. It's a situation that German news publisher Axel Springer has found itself in after spending months lobbying Google to stop indexing stories for Google News, it's now doing a U-Turn. As part of the original deal, Google pledged to only display the headlines from Springer's stable of sites, including Bild and Die Welt, while rivals would be shown with a thumbnail and a snippet of text. Unsurprisingly, without the extra content, people began to take their clicks elsewhere, causing Bild's traffic to drop like a stone with a weight problem. After a trial period, the publisher has decided that it'd really rather Google went back to indexing its stories after all. In a statement, boss Matias Doepfner admitted that the company had shot itself "out of the market," but threw a little shade at the search engine, saying that its power was simply too great to resist.
[Original image credit: Nico Trinkhaus, Flickr]
Source: Reuters
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