Google News: How Can It Make Money? - Who Are the Competitors?
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If you're a business, you expect to have competitors. Unless you're a sanctioned monopoly like Major League Baseball, or you're in a business where there really doesn't need to be a business, competition will always be a part of the game. But who competes with Google News? Given its inability to make money, who would want to?
For starters, how about Microsoft? The software giant has set its eyes on Google as the biggest threat to its Internet empire, and they're not sitting still on it. With the latest improvements to MSN Search, Microsoft might well be on the way to rivaling Google as Internet search king, toolbars and all. With their latest Newsbot, Microsoft hopes to take some of the spotlight away from Google, and given the recent improvements in the technology (PDF), they might just be able to dethrone Google as the king of news search.
But Microsoft faces the same problems Google does, and that is that it can't make money from its Newsbot. Still, when you're holding an empty sack, chances are someone else will also want it, even if it is just to have it.
Microsoft aside, the closest thing to competition Google has is the very news services Google aggregates from. News hubs like the Yahoo! and MSNBC, which spend millions on original and licensed news content. The problem for readers is that, those news services don't provide the search functionality found in Google News, and generally limit any news searches to content on their sites, and perhaps those of their partners, leaving users to search other news services manually in order to locate information. In addition, by leading searchers to their articles, the services being aggregated actually gain traffic from Google, which leads website owners to ask what the chances of optimizing their sites for Google News are.
Next: Who Benefits from Google News? >>
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