Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has drawn the ire of newspapers and physical publishing for quite a while now, but it honestly wants to help the news industry -- not cannibalize it. Or so, the company would have you think. Google News has been accused of "stealing content" many times before, although it's just an aggregator. It doesn't create -- just collects and displays.
So, it comes as a slight surprise that the world's largest information company wants its news customers to be able and "flip" through stories. Using a new feature called "FastFlip," Google will soon allow website news readers to flip through multiple publications and individual articles. Publishers like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Newsweek are all providing content in specific formats to make this possible. My oh my, how times have changed from just 2006.
By making news content easier to scan and read, Google hopes that more users will show up -- along with more advertising revenue. This is the same overall strategy newspapers have had forever -- the more the circulation, the more ad rates go up. This time, some heavyweights in the newspaper biz apparently agree and have ceded the point to Google. Now comes the revenue share details, which aren't public yet. So, Google hasn't killed the newspaper just yet, but it's helping the medium transform from newsprint to the computer screen as fast as possible.
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