Google ☞ reacted pretty quick (Dec.1st) to the pressure news corporations put on them when mentioning delisting from the search engine. In case you missed this part see the resource section for a couple of links to give you more context.
What exactly are they offering? Nothing: 1/ a change to the “First Click Free” program (see link for more details ☞ Changes in First Click Free), whose implementation responsibility is still on the published side and 2/ crawling and indexing of preview pages, which is something that they were already doing.
Then, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, has an article published on WSJ: ☞ How Google Can Help Newspapers in which he reinforces the Google benefit:
We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle.
Such a statement is a bit confusing to me as it sounds like the users generating this traffic were not looking to but they were convinced by Google to check the newspapers. And this sounds pretty incorrect. People are going to Google looking for something. If Google wouldn’t be there, they would go somewhere else to look for their answers and so those billions of visits will not be lost.
The only interesting part of the article is his perspective on the future of content consumption:
It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load.
Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. […]
Some of these stories are part of a monthly subscription package. Some, where the free preview sucks me in, cost a few pennies billed to my account. Others are available at no charge, paid for by advertising. But these ads are not static pitches for products I’d never use. Like the news I am reading, the ads are tailored just for me. Advertisers are willing to shell out a lot of money for this targeting.
