Should Google News monetize? Yes, why not?

Few months ago Google made its intentions of monetizing from Google News [official announcement] public,

Google is also rethinking its practice of providing some Web services without ads, so that it can generate more revenue. On Nov. 17, Google began running ads on Google Finance, a financial-news site, and said it would soon start showing ads to some users of its Google News service as well…More.

There has been a lot of rumbling and grumbling about Google trying to monetizing from third party content on Google News.

These days you hear about many newspapers shutting in the US. Many blame the newspapers for this because they are not willing to innovate or “co-operate” with online portals (I have faced this difficulty while speaking with print folks in India)

Good on them! If the newspapers had ever been even a tenth as cynical, opportunistic, and clever about exploiting their product and finding new advertisers as Google has, they wouldn’t be in this mess. Instead of condemning Google of “stealing” their content, newspapers should be grateful that someone’s making a pie — of which they can now ask for their fair share…More

When compared to India, Google News is far more popular in the US. The page ranks for the Indian (5/10) and US (9/10) versions speak for themselves. I think aggregators in the US are far more popular than India. The Huffington Post is a very popular aggregator in the US.

Huffington’s editors are especially adept at optimizing the site for search engine results, so that in a Google search, a Huffington Post summary of a Washington Post or a CNN.com report may appear ahead of the original article.

“We want to both drive traffic to ourselves and drive traffic to others,” Huffington said in a telephone interview. Adding that “we are (at) the beginning of developing the rules of the road” online, she said the site’s editors were “constantly talking” about appropriate excerpting conduct.

Huffington said The Huffington Post, which had at least 20 million unique visitors in January, received at least 100 requests for links each weekday from reporters, editors and public relations representatives. “Everybody wants to be linked to,” she said…More

For those who are not happy with Google monetizing from Google News,

• Every page of our site appears on Google.com search result pages (SERP). On the SERP pages also Google is monetizing, why are these publishers not raising a flag?
• If they are upset with Google monetizing, they should just block Google News from crawling their site. The problem is solved.

Oneindia’s language sites are indexed on Google News (India) and we really don’t have an issue with it. On the other hand we are grateful as we get “additional” traffic from Google News. What we object to is when sites copy the entire article and do not drive traffic to the original article.

I guess what publishers want is a revenue share from such aggregators. As technology improves may be there will be some way of figuring out how to compute that revenue share. Until then please drive the traffic to us..zooooooom 🙂

Update: Seattle Paper Advances Plans to Turn Into Online-Only Publication