Web firm Google says Fast Flip pages will give publishers the bulk of ad revenue
Google wants to improve the experience of online reading. Photograph: Christian Hartmann/Reuters
Google is launching an experimental news service that it says will boost the revenues and readership of newspapers and allow people to mimic the experience of flicking through pages to find a good read.
Google Fast Flip has partnered with more than 40 titles, mainly American and including the New York Times, to display pages in an experiment into how people "discover and consume media" online.
In contrast to the Google News aggregation service, which provides breaking news from 25,000 sources worldwide, this new service focuses on features, opinion and other longer articles. It will display screen shots from the publishers' websites, showing the bulk of an article rather than just headlines and opening paragraphs.
Fast Flip pages will display adverts as part of a revenue-sharing arrangement between Google and publishers, with the technology company saying "the majority of revenue goes to publishers".
"It's really designed to be a news service to improve the way that people are reading their articles online, to create a more engaging experience for them so they consume more content. Ultimately, partners get more of their content read and make more money from it," said Google's business product manager, Josh Cohen.
Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have been criticised by newspaper publishers for fostering a notion that journalistic content is free. With papers hit hard by falling advertising and a big shift to online readership, they are looking for ways to make more money from web audiences. Rupert Murdoch's announcement that his news websites will start charging over the next year has fuelled discussions over ways to get readers to pay that are not cumbersome and off-putting.
Cohen says the Google service, which launched overnight as part of the development division Google Labs, will help readers "visually browse" through news sites, including newspapers, magazines such as Marie Claire and online publishers such as Salon. The site will be sorted by themes, such as sport and business. It is also searchable, bringing up images from a collection of sites, showing how they have covered a certain topic.
"You can flip through pages till you find something you are interested in reading much like you would with a magazine or newspaper," says Cohen. "Or you can type in a query and in essence create a custom magazine on the fly."
The site becomes more customised the more a reader uses it and will also be available on android phones and Apple's iPhone. For now most partners are based in the US, apart from the BBC, but Google hopes to expand the experiment.
Google's latest news launch comes days after it emerged that the technology multinational is developing new software that will allow newspapers to charge users for certain online content using a system of micro-payments.
Cohen said there was "no direct tie" between Fast Flip and plans to create a micro-payment system. He said the new service was aimed at driving up revenues and readership and above all about understanding how news is read online. But he conceded it was not an altruistic bid to save newspapers.
"If you can create better experiences for users, that's a beneficial thing for Google," he said. "If people are spending more time online, that's ultimately better for us."
Monday 14 September 2009
Latest Google news service promises publishers money and readers
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