It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is flailing. Someone has to take the blame and fingers have been pointed at Google. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt took a stand decisively saying Google is not to blame for newspapers’ woes.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, said in a guest opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday many news executives think Google gets all the benefit from their business partnerships but doesn’t give much in return. He disagrees.
“Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle,” said Schmidt in the editorial. “That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free.”
He says Google is doing its part. They are developing a service called the Google Fast Flip, a technology which should make it easier to articles online and on handheld devices. The theory is that the easier articles are to read, the more people will read. Then the news partners will receive the majority of the ad revenue generated by display ads shown by the stories.
In addition, on Tuesday, Google announced it would be modifying its First Click Free program which will allow publishers, if they choose, to limit online readers to a only a certain number of page views without paying or registering.
This announcement came after Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, among many other publications and media organizations, threatened to remove its articles from indexing by Google because individual news articles accessed through Google can often be read for fee, even if the newspaper’s actual site charges a fee.
The rumors have been flying that Murdoch has been talking with Microsoft to side-step Google and index with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.
Written by Sharalyn Hartwell
HULIQ.com
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