Sep 04: The shift of policy by Google News that has now started its own news hosting may slowdown the process of revenue generation for the smaller websites. Earlier Google News was only providing links for articles from various news sources all over the web but now it will primarily focus on news articles from four primer news sources: The Associated Press, the Press Association of Great Britain, Canadian Press, and Agence France-Presse.
Google has signed agreement with these four agencies in which news articles will be featured under their own brands. This has permitted Google to show all content of the respected websites and hence giving direct access to the original content of the creators.
In fact it was first MSN and then Yahoo who have started functioning on the very same format with limited sources. Yahoo features news from AP, Reuters UK, BBC, Fox News, Business Week, Bloomberg, AFP, CNN IBN and some others. In this way Yahoo only hosts its own news and doesn’t offer any space to other regional or smaller websites. So, if Google starts functioning like this it certainly a setback for those websites who generate their revenue from web.
Google has made it clear that it’s new ‘news hosting’ service is best for users and also for those who provide original material. In fact if the company only offers links then the original content source ends with less traffic, as a result it was inevitable for the publishers to have a deal with the search engine. This certainly is going to change the entire PR functioning.
In fact those four organisations along with Google are now ready to take on any established newspapers in the world. In case of the Associated Press which has thousands of news reporters and bureaus globally will now get a chance to take the credit for their unique reporting. This way it is going to diminish the chances of small news agencies those first collect news from such big news organisations and then publish it though with different perspectives.
According to Google, it is an effort to cut down the duplicate and multiple copies of the same news story. So, news agencies need to come up with articles defining various standpoints to make it unique from others.
However, this will certainly reduce the advertising revenue for newspapers on the Internet. But on the same as far as local or regional news houses are concerned this will have very less impact on them as they are the first to flash any immediate happenings. No doubt for readers perspective it’s a good attempt by Google and also there is no immediate threat to other news service as Google will continue to offer links to other news websites.
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