Ad-free Google News generates $100 million per year?

Written on 24th July 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Joop Dorresteijn, East Asia correspondent

Marissa Mayer at web 2.0 conference in 2006, picture from D Farber (CC)

Marissa Mayer, head of search products and user experience at Google, put a number on the site’s revenue during a speech at the Fortune Brainstorm conference earlier this week. Fortune editor Jon Fortt about the income model: “The online giant figures that Google News funnels readers over to the main Google search engine, where they do searches that do produce ads. And that’s a nice business. Think of Google News as a $100 million search referral machine”

It seems that Google News generates $100 million revenue per year, despite the lack of ads or an obvious revenue model. Google news has been a sensitive subject before, and Mayer might have put even more pressure on the legal team with her comments on revenue. Until recently, the Google legal team could argue that the site was not profiting from the service. The site is more liable for a court case since the site’s referring features turns out to be a cash cow for the search portal.

Valleywag reporter Nicholas Carlson, shared an interesting perspective. “When she puts a number on how much money Google News makes for her employer, she gives newspapers’ lawyers a big, fat, juicy reason to demand a cut of the business. Sure, the newspapers already make money from the traffic Google sends their way — but do you think, given a $100 million prize, they won’t try to double-dip?” He notes that Mayer is worth hundreds of millions, and that Google might as well can fetch the check for the legal bill with her.

court case, google news, Marissa Mayer

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Google News-suing Copiepresse loves to look back

Written on 28th May 2008                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Some media companies are still holding on to their old-values, desperately trying to make money like they used to. Take Copiepresse for example, this Belgian French-language newspaper company wants Google News to pay them 49 million Euros. Why? Because Google News drives traffic to their sites? Because Google News introduces kids to this strange phenomenon called newspapers? No.., the way Copiepresse sees it, Google News is stealing away ad revenue by indexing the articles published by Copiepresse’s newspapers.

Sad but true, Copiepresse has already won a case like this against Google in 2006. And now they’re after the money.

Apart from the fact that Copiepresse can prevent the indexing by creating a robot.txt file, their attitude is simply embarrassing. Instead of profiting from all the beautiful opportunities the new web offers, Copiepresse just focuses on destruction.

Not only symbolizes this complaints of many media experts like Dan Lyons – aka Fake Steve Jobs-, it also ruins the reputation of traditional media in general. There’s a lot of talent and potential in that industry which I and probably many others would like to welcome in this beautiful new world, yet their executives are way too busy looking backwards. I’m sorry guys, those good old one-to-many days are almost over.

claim, copiepresse, court case, google news, Press

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