How To Make Google News Profitable
I ran into an acquaintance today and our conversation steered into a discussion about Google News and how according to some interviews/articles he has read, Google wasn't sure how to make money off of their Google News product.
I thought about our discussion and came up with some ideas that may work.
The basic idea is to get news sites/agencies to pay some small amount per click (ie. like Adwords) in a new sponsored links section.
Why would they pay?
Because these days there are a lot of news agencies reporting about the same story and the competition for luring the reader seems fierce between them. Each agency wants to generate as much traffic on their site as possible to make their own money off of advertisements, keep advertisers happy and increase/maintain popularity of their news site/product. By advertising with Google News or Yahoo News through sponsored links section they can achieve this.
How can this be integrated into the site without introducing media bias?
This can be done by distinguishing regular links and sponsored links: as done with Search. For instance, right now there is a green line of news sources under each article in Google News. One can add another line (eg. purple) containing a few sponsored links just below. I'm sure the UI experts at Google and Yahoo can find a neater way to integrate those links, but that's the gist of the idea.
How to make the sponsored links dynamic and avoid duplicates?
First it might be possible that the same link would come up in the 'green' and 'purple' sections; there are many ways to fix this, if at all (eg. one way is to remove the sponsored link or leave it and not charge for having it there).
Secondly to make the sponsored, 'purple', links section dynamic, so that there will be a point for different news agencies to compete and pay for those links, one can integrate the original article relevance algorithm (ie. presumably one is used to sort the 'green results') with the rankings of the advertised links.
Its possible I haven't covered some aspects of the problem, but essentially this is the idea ... would this work?
I thought about our discussion and came up with some ideas that may work.
The basic idea is to get news sites/agencies to pay some small amount per click (ie. like Adwords) in a new sponsored links section.
Why would they pay?
Because these days there are a lot of news agencies reporting about the same story and the competition for luring the reader seems fierce between them. Each agency wants to generate as much traffic on their site as possible to make their own money off of advertisements, keep advertisers happy and increase/maintain popularity of their news site/product. By advertising with Google News or Yahoo News through sponsored links section they can achieve this.
How can this be integrated into the site without introducing media bias?
This can be done by distinguishing regular links and sponsored links: as done with Search. For instance, right now there is a green line of news sources under each article in Google News. One can add another line (eg. purple) containing a few sponsored links just below. I'm sure the UI experts at Google and Yahoo can find a neater way to integrate those links, but that's the gist of the idea.
How to make the sponsored links dynamic and avoid duplicates?
First it might be possible that the same link would come up in the 'green' and 'purple' sections; there are many ways to fix this, if at all (eg. one way is to remove the sponsored link or leave it and not charge for having it there).
Secondly to make the sponsored, 'purple', links section dynamic, so that there will be a point for different news agencies to compete and pay for those links, one can integrate the original article relevance algorithm (ie. presumably one is used to sort the 'green results') with the rankings of the advertised links.
Its possible I haven't covered some aspects of the problem, but essentially this is the idea ... would this work?
posted by Alex Pilchin at 4:20 PM
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