Google News: How Can It Make Money?

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Google News has been sitting in "Beta" for the past three years. Why? Probably because the company hasn't yet figured out how to monetize the service. Can it ever make money? And if it's not making money, why does it have competition?

When Google News launched three years ago, the folks at MSNBC, the Yahoo!, and other Internet newsrooms must have been pretty scared. After all, while they spent millions of dollars sending operatives around the world to get exclusives and breaking stories, Google sent out its army of spiders to those sites and created what can be considered the world's largest news agency, with over 7,000 news sources delivering results, while at the same time not having even one reporter in-house. In this case, Google took advantage of a basic Internet paradigm: it doesn't matter who first broke a story, if enough people are talking about it, then the biggest news sources will always get the credit.

All news from all over the world, all the time. Not a bad way to promote a site, wouldn't you say?

The problem that Google News has been having, however, hasn't been with whether they get enough readers, or whether someone's beat them to the punch with the latest news. With Google's exposure, the readership was sure to come, and on the Internet, it's not who broke the story that matters, but rather how many people will talk about it - and point their links to your site - that really counts. As it stands now, Google news relies on the republication of copyrighted, time sensitive material in order to bring traffic to their site. And that's just the problem.

Although Google News has been a blessing to anyone looking for not just Internet pages, but actual news stories on a certain subject, the company still hasn't figured out how to make money with the service. So what's a company to do? Google News might be the most visited news service in the world, but if they can't make any money off of it, they simply have a tight grip on an empty sack.

Next: Who Are the Competitors? >>
 

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