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March 28, 2024

Google’s Fast Flip Portends Two Signal Shifts

Important Details:  Google released Fast Flip, its effort to escape from the text-bound news search world, and to re-energize its relationship with news publishers. 

Fast Flip is a visual feast or optical overkill, depending on how you take it in.  Organized by title, topic, most recent and recommended, the product — still formally in Google Labs — tries out a new news search metaphor: pictures. Stories are displayed in web page form, in screenshots.

News search, for the most part has been text-based. A decade ago that was innovation enough, being able to get to 4300 or so global news sources within a single interface, with reasonable relevance. The issues: What we can call the New Search 1.0 experience has been so list-like, so redundant and duplicative and so lacking clarity as to original source. It will be replaced; the question is with what?

We see visualization coming on strong here. On the same day Google let Fast Flip out of the lab, Microsoft announced “Bing Visual Search,” after introducing visual mouseovers as Bing debuted. Newser has brought a “Hollywood Squares” visual feel to current news. Overall, we can see the strong lineage of Apple’s cover-flow presentation; the news world is learning from the entertainment industry here.

Google signed up more than three dozen publishers — and tells Outsell it will add new ones, but will keep the product “manageable.”  Google signed up premium content providers, ranging from top newspapers (the New York Times, the Washington Post), top magazines (Business Week, Esquire, Popular Mechanics), top broadcasters (BBC News, Frontline), top web-only sites (Techcrunch, Slate, Salon, Daily Beast) and  three top independent investigative sites (Center for Investigative Reporting, Pro Publica, Center for Public Integrity). All the companies represented have opted to be part of the program — they are essentially licensing content to Google.

For publishers, it’s a test, one of many at this point.

“We’re trying to find out how users relate to a visual interface,” Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at the New York Times told Outsell.  “It’s purely a research project,” a six-month test, he says. His hope: visual search can take readers beyond the news search 1.0 world which Nisenholtz describes as one “where everything seems to be generic and the algorithm rules.” Visual search allows for a “brand presence,” something that high-quality news producers have been seeking to reclaim in the digital wilderness. Creating and selling advertising against premium content, of course, is one of top publishers’ top strategies.

Google, in licensing the screenshots (which it will receive by RSS feed or grab with its crawler), has agreed to give publishers the majority of ad revenue earned on Google-hosted Fast Flip pages. Once a user clicks on a screenshot, she will move off to a publisher’s page, on its own url.

If Fast Flip succeeds with consumers, Google says it is ready to license the technology for use by publishers on their own websites.

Mobile versions of Fast Flip are immediately available as well, for but for iPhone and Android-powered phones only at this point. On mobile, Fast Flip is obtainable through the mobile browser; no app is available.

Implications: Fast Flip looks a bit overwhelming at first blush. Its business doesn’t offer much order or clarity, though we do see lots of visuals. Consider it an early product, and as Google would say, “still in the lab.”

Outsell believes that the innovation reminds us that search isn’t anywhere near over; in fact, it’s just beginning. Humans are visual people and some manner of visual search, smartly matched with text (hey, isn’t that a newspaper?), will be found. Build it and people will migrate.

Though this experimental product won’t yield much revenue, it sets up a new dynamic between publishers and Google. For the first time, individual publishers will gain some ad revenue share for ads sold related to current news content on Google.com (newswires have already gained licensing/revenue agreements) .  We’ve made the argument that the industry needs a new Fair Share agreement with Google, and we think this modest step is one in the right direction toward that end (see Insights, Google and Newspapers: Beyond Fair Use to Fair Share, April 10, 2009).

Finally, make no mistake. This is competitive move by Google. With half the newspaper industry in partnership with Yahoo (and thus arch-enemy, Microsoft) through the Newspaper Consortium, it needs to redouble efforts to play well and become a better collaborator with news companies.

It also needs to do better in news search. In search and paid search, it’s the dominant #1 player. In news search, it’s ninth, behind Yahoo News, MSNBC, and AOL. Product innovation may be the key to moving up.