by SEO Consultant
R. Falconer
R. Falconer
The latest innovations by Google may indicate that Google is moving towards acting more like a publisher but is this really anything new?As reported last week, Google has released a new gadget called "What's Popular" similar in functionality to sites such as Digg, Reddit and Propellor. By adding the What's Popular gadget to an iGoogle homepage you receive a stream of headlines and can vote these up or down. Google has dipped its toe in the waters of user voting previously with its search SearchWiki product but this time it's even more like other social new sites.
For some time, commentators such as John Battelle have predicted that Google will have to move towards acting as less of a search engine and more of a publisher as it tries to continue increasing revenue. Launching a gadget with similar functionality to Digg (you may remember Google expressed interest in buying Digg last year) before expanding it into a full site seems a smart way to go to take a slice of what is a potentially huge money earner for Google.
To add more weight to the theory that Google is moving towards acting like a publisher, in a story by Sharon Waxman, Eric Schmidt is said to have spoken about Google's plans for Google News and apparently Google is working on an algorithm that will bring personalised news items to users without them entering a query.
Google News currently works in a similar way to normal search - if you want to find out the latest news reports on swine flu, type in "swine flu" into Google News. In six months or so, simply navigating to Google News may provide you with a mixture of results based on your previous search habits, choices and other information.
Google apparently plans to roll out the new, improved Google News in about six months with the New York Times and Washington Post being the first news organisations to avail of the service. According to Waxman, the usual Google arrangement will stand. That is, Google provides traffic rather than money to the publisher and they can, in turn, sell advertising (often through Google Adwords) on their pages.
As owners of YouTube, Blogger and Knol, Google's move towards acting as a publisher is not really in question other than by Google itself. With regards to acting as a publisher on Google News, one point that has been missed out by most sites is the fact that Google already is a publisher on Google News. In this link an entire Associated Press article has been published by Google and credited to AP. Google pays AP to publish articles such as this part of agreements made in 2006 and 2007.
Much criticism is levelled at Google for not sharing the premium advertising revenue from Google News against the premium content (see Sharon Waxman) but what is missed here is that Google already pays various publishers for their content. Only they know how much this amounts to, but presumably it's enough. This arrangement came about as a resolution of a dispute with Associated Press in 2006. Google now pays certain news agencies for the use of their content but has stated that the payments are in order to use the content in other Google News products in future.
Google continues to deny that it is a publisher but the overwhelming evidence seems to point to that increasingly being the case.
