Google begins hosting news content on its own site

Sept. 1  

SAN FRANCISCO (CP) - Internet search leader Google Inc. on Friday began hosting material produced by The Associated Press, The Canadian Press and two other news services on its own website instead of only sending readers to other destinations.

The change affects hundreds of stories and photographs distributed each day by the AP, CP, Agence France-Presse and The Press Association in the United Kingdom. It could diminish Internet traffic to newspaper and broadcast companies' websites where those stories and photos are also found - a development that could reduce those companies' revenue from online advertising.

Google negotiated licensing deals with the AP and French news agency during the last two years after the services raised concerns about whether the search engine had been infringing on their copyrights. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company also reached licensing agreements with CP, Canada's national news agency, and the Press Association during the same period.

CP president Eric Morrison said it's too early to tell what impact the new arrangement will have on Internet traffic and consumer news search patterns.

"People will have to wait and see," said Morrison, whose Canadian news co-operative has been providing news and photos to online customers for more than a decade. "The interesting thing for me is that now Google is actually paying for aggregating content from other providers."

Morrison also said the fees paid by Google to CP for its content will help support the quality of the 90-year-old non-profit agency's news coverage, which will benefit all its member newspapers as well as broadcasters, other websites and customers.

The new approach won't change the look of Google News or affect the way the section handles material produced by other media. Google also said it isn't altering its formula for finding news, so the material from the AP and other services won't be elevated in the pecking order of its search results.

Although Google already had bought the right to display content produced by all four services affected by the change, the search engine's news section had continued to link to the sites of other web publishers to read the stories and look at the photographs. For example, a Google News user who clicked on an AP story about the latest developments in Iraq would be steered to one of the hundreds of websites that also have the right to post the same article.

That helped drive more traffic to the websites of newspapers and broadcasters who pay annual fees to help finance the AP, a 161-year-old co-operative owned by news organizations.

Now, Google visitors interested in reading an AP story will remain on Google's website unless they click on a link that enables them to read the same story on other sites. Google doesn't have any immediate plans to run ads alongside the news stories or photographs hosted on its site, but company officials aren't ruling out the possibility in the future.

AP and the other news services already receive an unspecified amount of money from Google for the rights to their content. The licensing agreement had always given Google the right to host the material, but the search engine hadn't done so until Friday.

Although the change might not even be noticed by many Google users, the decision to corral the content from the AP and other news services may irritate publishers and broadcasters if the move results in less traffic for them and more for the Internet's most powerful company.

A diminished audience would likely translate into less online revenue, compounding the financial headaches of long-established media already scrambling to make up for the money that has been lost as more advertisers shift their spending to the Internet.

Google has been the trend's biggest beneficiary as its search engine emerged as hub of the Internet's largest advertising network. In the first half of this year, the nine-year-old company earned US$1.9 billion on revenue of US$7.5 billion.

Several other major websites, including Yahoo, Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, have been featuring AP and CP material for years within their sites. Google has an even larger potential audience because its search engine handles more than half of the online search requests in the United States.

However, despite Google's dominance in search, its news section lags behind the industry leaders. In July, Google News attracted 9.6 million visitors, trailing Yahoo News (33.8 million visitors), MSNBC (24.5 million), AOL News (23.9 million) and CNN (22.5 million), according to comScore Media Metrix.

Referrals from Google News accounted for 2.2 per cent of the traffic at newspaper websites during the week ending Aug. 25, according to another research firm, Hitwise. Broadcast sites got 1.5 per cent of their traffic from Google News during the same period, Hitwise said.

Echoing a familiar refrain, Google said it believes its users will be better served if its website hosts the content from the AP and the three other services.

With the new approach, Google reasons readers won't have to pore through search results listing the same story posted on different sites. That should in turn make it easier to discover other news stories at other websites that might previously have been buried, said Josh Cohen, the business product manager for Google News.

"This may result in certain publishers losing traffic for their news wire stories, but it will allow more room for their original content," Cohen said.

Vlae Kershner, news director for the San Francisco Chronicle's website, backed up that theory, saying Google News mostly refers readers interested in reading the newspaper's staff-written stories. "This is going to have a very minimal impact on our traffic," he said.