Monetising Newspaper Content

Google has partnered with about 100 newspapers across the US to digitise them and make scanned copies available online, and to eventually cover newspapers worldwide.

NEWSPAPER sites around the world don’t make much money. With the exception of a few niche sites like the Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com), the overwhelming majority of newspaper sites give away the content for free.

This includes all the newspaper sites in Malaysia. Some considered charging in the early days but with the trend of “content wants to be free” pervading over the Internet, none has tried to charge a fee for news content.

Some newspapers do charge for archives but that doesn’t make much money. Few people bother to use the archives. Usually, the ones who pay for it are those who are looking for specific articles for research purposes.

Since this is not exactly mass consumer stuff, many newspapers find that it’s not really worthwhile to digitize their much older material. That typically requires either having people actually retype all the copy or using some scanning service to convert the printed articles into text. The problem with that is the converted text is never accurate and an editor will still have to clean it up to ensure accuracy.

Another innovation: Catering waiters working in front of a logo of Google at the Frankfurt Book Fair in this Oct 21, 2005 file photo. Its business model, as always, is to provide the service to consumers for free and for it to make money through its AdSense advertising service. — AFP

It’s a tedious process and the cost of doing so could never be recouped due to the relatively low demand for such archived materials. So, it often doesn’t get done, especially if it’s a newspaper that has a long history. Imagine doing this for a paper that dates back over 100 years or more.

Along comes Google with its “free” strategy supported by ads. Google’s business model all along has been to give all its products and offerings for free. And it is doing so again with this latest effort.

The search giant has partnered with about 100 newspapers across the US to digitise them and make scanned copies available online. Eventually it will cover other papers around the world.

“This effort will enable us to help you find an even greater range of material from newspapers large and small,” wrote Google product manager Punit Soni on the company blog. “This effort is just the beginning. As we work with more and more publishers, we’ll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint from around the world searchable, discoverable and accessible online.”

Others from Google are lauding this as a real big deal. “This is huge,” said Google vice-president of search Marissa Mayer at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco earlier this week. “We’re branching into a new form of content.” In her demonstration, Mayer showed off pages from the Rome News Tribune and called up a story covering an American moonwalk.

The way it’s done means users will see entire pages of the original newspaper as they were printed at the time. This kind of approach, of scanning whole pages, would actually make old content more interesting. It shows the relevant story and other headlines, adverts and promotions of the day giving a sense of what it was like at the time.

“The compelling part of the product for me is to get a sense of context and the importance of what else happened that day,” Mayer said.

You could easily imagine people looking up newspapers to find out how life was like and what happened on a particular day in time. Perhaps on their birthday. Many people would like to know about the significant events on their birthday.

The technology involved is not rocket science. In fact, it’s very similar to the scanning technology that is used for Google Books and it expands on an initial two-year effort by the firm to work with two leading American newspapers, the New York Times and Washington Post, to index old papers in Google News Archives.

Google, of course, is not doing this for charity. Its business model, as always, is to provide the service to consumers for free and for it to make money through its AdSense advertising service. Revenue earned will be shared with publishers.

Initially, the archives will be available through Google News, its popular news links aggregator site, but the company plans to give newspapers a way to make their archives available on their own sites. Will this be a new source of significant revenues for newspaper websites? I doubt it’d be a big income earner. But it’s one additional revenue stream.

And if a newspaper’s archives are being converted by Google for the newspapers for free, that’s not such a bad thing for the newspaper companies even if they don’t make a lot of money from it.

Oon Yeoh loves the idea of news archives. Check out his archives at www.oonyeoh.com.