Google News Becomes Content Publisher
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | September 4, 2007 | Share This
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Google announced Friday that it is now hosting content from four major news agencies, including the AP, on Google News. This is similar to the relationships that MSNBC and Yahoo have had with news wires for several years, but it’s a big step because it takes Google News’ function beyond indexing to include publishing. Interestingly, one of the agencies that signed on is none other than Agence France-Presse, notorious former plaintiff in a 2005 Google lawsuit in which it had demanded removal of all its content from the Google News index.
In conjunction with this deal, and with graver consequences for the rest of the publishing world, Google News is also rolling out “duplicate detection,” which means other sites that pick up news-wire content, such as the New York Times, stand to lose a ton of potential traffic and ad revenue. From a user-experience standpoint, duplicate detection is pretty savvy, but it’s a disaster for newspapers. Mathew Ingram explains:
…Google has agreed to give the wires’ version of a story prominence over the thousands of versions of that story that appear on the websites of the various newspapers that are members of AP, AFP, etc. This is potentially explosive, I think. Whenever I search for a news story in Google News, I get hundreds of identical versions of that story from newspapers that picked it up from Associated Press — and I may even click through to the first newspaper that has a copy. But if I can see the story from the wire service itself, before it was edited or shortened or changed, I would probably prefer that.
And John Battelle writes:
[I]f I were running a newspaper, I’d be livid. I pay the wire services so that I can get the eyeballs. Now Google is paying them, presumably (no comment on this in the coverage), and the inevitable result is that the newspaper outlets will lose traffic to Google’s direct relationship with the wire services.
Actually, Forbes reports that Google was already paying the wires to include their content in the news index and isn’t paying extra to host it, but Battelle’s point about the role of wire services in publishing is a good one, and it will be interesting to see how the relationship between newspapers and wire services changes as a result of this change to the Google-news wire relationship.
Though there’s currently no ad structure in place on Google News, Google isn’t ruling out advertising for the hosted stories and will most likely implement it. The potential loss in traffic and revenue will likely be a hard blow for newspaper publishers, who are already beleaguered by poor print ad performance: Silicon Alley Insider reported today that newspaper print ad revenue numbers for 2007 will be at 1997 levels.
Google News also recently added an experimental feature allowing people or organizations included within a story to add their comments, which are then also hosted by Google.
Topics: Advertising: Offline, Advertising: Online, Google, Publishing |