How Google Eats a Business Whole
Adrianne Jeffries (via Danny Sullivan):
In 2014, Warner got an email from Google asking if he would be interested in giving the company access to his data in order to scrape it for Knowledge Graph, for free.
[…]
“I didn’t understand the benefit to us,” he said. “It’s a big ask. Like, ‘hey, let us tap into the most valuable thing that you have, that has taken years to create and we’ve spent literally millions of dollars, and just give it to us for free so we can display it.’ At the end of it, we just said ‘look, we’re not comfortable with this.’”
“But then they went ahead and took the data anyway.”
Now that Warner has had to lay off half his staff, the data is surely going to suffer.
