Chris Dixon: News is a lousy business for Google too
Monday, 8 March 2010, 18:02
"… because their real business is selling ads on queries where the user likely has purchasing intent. Big money-making categories include travel, consumer electronics and malpractice lawyers. News queries are loss leaders."
BuzzMachine: Helping news be news
Thursday, 18 February 2010, 23:38
"Google News has just open-sourced its code to create what it calls Living Stories. What this really is, I think, is Google’s attempt to take editors to school on content presentation in our new world. The article, I’ve argued, is outmoded as the building block of news. The new atomic unit(s) of journalism needs to reflect the transition of news from a product to a process."
paidContent:UK: Google Tightens FT.com’s Free-Article Loophole
Thursday, 18 February 2010, 22:43
"[FT.com is] planning a Q2 switch-on for the [Google First Click Free] modification, which will instead limit the number of paywalled articles searchers can read freely to five in any day."
Econsultancy: What a lot of rubbish everyone is talking about Google and paywalls
Thursday, 3 December 2009, 12:02
Malcolm Coles on the rubbish reporting on the First Click Free yesterday: "The biggest load of old rubbish ever has been written about the changes to Google's first click free program. Here's a round up of who understands what they are talking about (and might survive with a paywall) and who hasn't got a clue…"
John Battelle’s Searchblog: What Are The Conversion Rates for Google’s “First Click Free”?
Wednesday, 2 December 2009, 09:33
"I'd guess it's a pretty low percentage of folks who actively try to get the Wall Street Journal by repeatedly searching on Google. The really interesting question is this: Does 'First Click Free' actually deliver a decent conversion of paid customers to media companies?"
Google Webmaster Central Blog: Changes in First Click Free
Wednesday, 2 December 2009, 09:28
"[We've] found that some [publishers] who might try [First Click Free] are worried about people abusing the spirit of First Click Free to access almost all of their content. As most users are generally happy to be able to access just a few pages from these premium content providers, we've decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to five free accesses per user each day."
Google News Blog: Google and paid content
Wednesday, 2 December 2009, 09:18
"Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free. Now, we've updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing. If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day."
Searchengineland: Josh Cohen Of Google News On Paywalls, Partnerships & Working With Publishers
Sunday, 15 November 2009, 23:51
Cohen: "If you have subscription content, the user response to it will in effect tell the algorithm this isn’t not a relevant result, I’m not clicking on this. By making it free or by in essence saying it’s paid but Google treats it as free [because of First Click Free], there’s a significant advantage to them, because all their content is indexed, and I think at the end of the day probably helps the results. People are more likely to link to it and all the different ways it can be beneficial."
Boing Boing: Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp’s websites out of Google, abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals
Sunday, 15 November 2009, 12:48
Cory Doctorow on November 8: "So here's what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he's … hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you've never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year's operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google."
Techcrunch: Badda Bing! Microsoft woos newspapers by funding their stick to beat Google
Sunday, 15 November 2009, 12:25
"Microsoft plans to launch an assault on Google’s flank, by cosying up to major content providers, especially newspapers, that feel hard done by Google News. It plans to use Bing as a way to entice them out of the Google eco-system, into one where, increasingly, the content of major newspapers could well be found more often on Bing than on Google. … Our sources say Microsoft has pledged to help fund research and engineering into ACAP to the tune of about will put £100,000. This is the more granular version of the robots.txt protocol which has been proposed by publishers to enable them to have a more sophisticated response to search engine crawlers. "
Online Journalism Review: Does your site really need to be in Google News?
Thursday, 29 October 2009, 08:55
Robert Niles: "What if your site's focus is local, as are the readers your advertisers want to reach? What if you are trying to build an online community, cultivating ongoing relationships with a core of contributing readers? 'Drive-by' visitors from search engines inflate your site's traffic stats, but they don't help you reach those goals. Worse, traffic numbers plumped by infrequent visitors clicking news alerts create a distorted picture of your website's health and viability. As an industry, we've got to develop a deeper reading relationship with our audience. From the data I've seen, the shortest route to that goal lies in building traffic through human connections, not search engines and their news pages."
Hitwise: Record week for Google News
Monday, 21 September 2009, 17:12
"[Last] week was Google News UK’s busiest ever, with Internet visits increasing 71% and the site ranking as the 28th most popular overall (up from 46th the previous week)."
Business Insider: Google FastFlip Is Latest Attack On Amazon Kindle
Tuesday, 15 September 2009, 19:13
Dan Frommer: "What's the point of Google's new FastFlip reader? … But because it loads pages very fast — and requires minimal effort to navigate — it could be useful for portable devices. Specifically, tablet-like gadgets with 3G modems that could compete with Amazon's Kindle."
Online Journalism Blog: Google’s Fast Flip – a cruel joke on the news industry
Tuesday, 15 September 2009, 19:03
Paul Bradshaw: "why are the web-native minds of Google wasting time on such an analogue-mindset concept? … Add in their recently mooted micropayments system and it’s almost as if Google are having a bit of fun tormenting ants with a magnifying glass."
