Long-Awaited Google News Archives Debut
Important Details: The launch of Google News Archive may be remembered as a Humpty-Dumpty event for news publishers and providers. Until today, finding an article more than seven days old has often been difficult, sometimes torturous. Now as the first archival eggs have fallen from the top of the wall, expect more to follow, as well as the inevitable questions. Who will make the money, the cook (Google), the egg producers (news publishers), and/or the many servers, those best able to aggregate and present useful news article solutions for consumers and enterprise users (aggregators from LexisNexis and Factiva to HighBeam and NewsBank)? Perhaps all of them, and mostly around advertising, we believe, as the cracked egg of walled-off content may not be able to be re-assembled.
Google’s announcement was hardly a surprise among publishers, who had long awaited "Google Premium," the archival access product in the works for at least the last year.
The new product is impressive, out of the gate:
- There’s a critical mass of content that can be accessed, at least hundreds of mainstream sources including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and more than a couple hundred regional and community dailies. HighBeam and NewsBank both appear to be well-represented, as they in turn represent their publisher partners. Other aggregators are in at launch, including LexisNexis, Factiva, Thomson Gale, and ProQuest Archiver, which is putting its digitized historical pages of the Times, the Post and other papers into the mix. Some aggregators and publishers have integrated well, knowing they will be getting an avalanche of new and often first-time traffic, offering "free trials" to their services. New York Times TimesSelect customers find accessing Times archives seamless.
- The user experience is still a work in progress. On the first day, it’s all over the board. Recency and relevance seem to be a work in progress, though the timeline (by years) and the dynamic source list (depending on search term) are nice touches. You can’t pick either subscription, free, or both sources (like you can with HighBeam), but you are alerted to whether an article carries a fee, with "subscription" noted clearly at the front of the result. Google doesn’t host the content, so once a reader clicks, she’s off to the originating Web site and, in cases where payment is required, a new e-commerce interface. The news archives link appears on Google’s news page. Archive listings also will be featured at the bottom of the regular Google Search results page within the next few days.
- Perhaps surprisingly, there are plenty of good-enough free archives available. These include decades of Time magazine, the BBC, USAToday, Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other regional dailies.
As this test unfolds, Outsell believes publishers and news providers of all kinds can watch and respond to these drivers:
- How free archive content fares against paid content. In test or personal searches, or in metrics gained from the Google News Archives experience, we’ll see whether good-enough free material is supplanting paid archives for most purposes.
- How paid content fares against other paid content. Out of the box, it’s not clear what happens when the same article is found in multiple aggregator databases. Will it surface in more than one place? Will consumers be able to compare pricing, which can vary from $2.95 to $9.95 per piece? The Google News Archive aggregation may lead to greater transparency in comparative pricing.
- When Google starts monetizing the Archives pages with contextual ads. Google launches this product, as it has others, without ads. Presumably that puts off for another day the nasty question of whether and how to split revenue with publishers on Google-hosted search pages – new pages whose perhaps booming value is built jointly on Google technology and publisher content.
- How Google links Google Archives to highly-trafficked Google sites, including Web search and Google News, and then lesser successes, like Gmail, Google Finance, and Google Groups. Right now, users have to find archives and then work through the process. The big play here is clearly contextual – wherever on the Google site and wherever on the Google-supplied syndication network contextual archives make sense, they should and someday will be presented, side-by-side with relevant content.
- How much non-mainstream news is brought into Google Archives over time. Google made a point of saying that only traditional news archives – not blogs – would be part of the News Archives, for now. Emphasis: for now. That statement provides some early comfort for news publishers, making it easier to lure them into the program. But Google, better than anyone, knows it’s a relational world, and consumers will want archives of anything relevant to them. That will include Google-digitized books, blogs, music, videos, podcasts – media content of all kinds.
In Outsell’s Opinion: Google Archives is another, major step forward in making whole a content world for consumers. The Web uniquely offers consumers the widest potential spectrum of news and information ever possible – that’s yesterday (archives), today (news), and tomorrow (alerts). The maze of archive interfaces has only annoyed consumers, bruised from running into pay walls and looking for a salve. Google Archives doesn’t quite offer that salve, but it provides a better promise of it.
Can Google make this work? Maybe. What Google Archives offers is a much better entrance to the maze. Google needs to make its experiment work better than Yahoo!’s half-hearted Subscriptions initiative, which has fallen on its own inertia, lack of breadth, and inability to connect well with enough of the Yahoo! customer experience.
Outsell believes that the experiment will ratify the notion that most consumers most of the time are satisfied with good-enough information. As Google’s new product and the newer Topix and HighBeam products show, access to free good-enough information is greater than many readers ever knew.
As consumers see many choices, side-by-side, free and paid, inevitably they’ll vote with their fingertips and wallets. Our bet is that ad monetization of archives will be the prevailing model within three to five years. Customers want "free," and the contextual ad matching systems (with behavioral tracking in hot pursuit) will make the ad proposition increasingly lucrative. Which, of course, leads us back full circle to Google (and Yahoo!), with their leading ad-matching systems. A cynical view of the Google Archives announcement is that this is just one attempt to drive all content to free – and monetized by Google-owned ad systems. And don’t forget Google Base, the low-pulsing nerve center, with an uncertain diet and an uncertain appetite.
We won’t know the winners and losers emerging out of Google Archives for a while. But the challenges are clear.
For Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL, it’s another shot across the bow, as Google’s growing lead in Web and paid search has added worry this year.
For news publishers, it was an offer many of them couldn’t afford to refuse. They have long needed a centralized archive resource, first trying to build one themselves in the mid-’90s in New Century Network. As they let that moment and others pass, they now are forced to follow the lead of the big search engines. The lesson is that they must be light on their feet, maintaining pay models as long as they make sense, while testing the ad monetization of archival content – and driving as good a deal on revenue splits as they can individually, or collectively as they deal with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN (GYM).
For aggregators, this additional step to a freer, more accessible world is a reminder that they must continue to improve their own differentiation. As suppliers to corporate and educational America and beyond, many aggregators have improved their content sets, tool sets, interfaces, and training – all in an effort to say "we offer lots more value than you can get for free on the Web, and that’s why you should pay us." Now Google has upped the ante, and aggregators have two tasks in front of them: 1) improving further their own differentiation, better serving client niches and needs; 2) figuring out how best to play in a world in which more and more content won’t be "paid for," but will funded by advertising. Many aggregators have little experience with advertising, and, as buyers, sellers, and partners, they had best learn quickly.