Ads on Google News: Uneasy Honeymoon with 4,500 Ending?

With the exception of the occasional crank, most newspaper execs have stayed silent about their relationship with Google News, and for good reason. They get more traffic referrals via the links on GN than from any other source, although Yahoo, MSN, and AOL also send significant traffic to the newspaper sites.

I write this without being to able to supply any hard figures, because neither sources inside Google, nor the major newspaper companies have been willing to share their specific figures with me. Maybe that will begin to change as this week’s news that Google News intends to begin displaying ads next to the headlines and abstracts it displays from its 4,500 English language news sources sinks in throughout the industry.

As with most Google initiatives, this one is being rolled out somewhat cautiously and in a limited fashion — the ads will initially be seen only by those accessing GN from the U.S. But, as we’ve long noted, one of Google’s competitive advantages over other companies, like Yahoo, is it has a much more aggressive approach to developing a global audience.

So, I fully expect the advertising units to be expanded to exploit the company’s global reach before long. Meanwhile, back here, what can newspapers and other sources do about Google’s first serious attempt to monetize its GN product?

Nothing, for the reasons mentioned at the top. Unless, they want to join the cranks, they’ll just have to suck it up, and hope Google eventually offers a revenue split on the money it will be collecting by displaying others’ content.

What puzzles me is why Google’s own execs did not add a bit of original content — say blogs by in-house “curators” who could serve as “hosts” for all of these aggregated links, organized by the existing taxonomy utilized by GN?  Then, there would be no real argument over the addition of ads. If Eric Schmidt is truly serious about wanting to help save existing media, he needs to join the party and stop raining on it!

Original content rules! Just a bit allows all sort of other scraping, aggregation and linking action, and then the revenue can really begin to roll. Dear Google: Wake up! Hire a band of writers! (Hint: They’re all of out of work anyway, so you can name your terms.)