Tom Pimental : Web Creative

Google announced last week that they would be hosting full-text versions of AP articles at Google News, finally proving that they are in the content business, which should have been obvious to anyone after purchasing YouTube, the largest publisher of original video content on the web.

Google justified the move by claiming that its a step towards reducing duplicate content stating, “Instead of 20 ‘different’ articles (which actually used the exact same content), we’ll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist.” Also, according to PaidContent, Google does not have any current plans to advertise on the AP stories appearing on Google News, “but company officials aren’t ruling out the possibility in the future.”

So what does this mean for news publishers?

1. Wire services are dead. Unless you have a very large base of loyal customers reading your syndicated articles, feel free to reinvest the $3000-$5000/month you spend on the AP or Reuters on original content for your site, because no one will be coming from Google for it.
2. Original content is still king. YouTube aside, until Google actually invests in content creation (or a tool that enables citizen journalism), content publishers should focus on creating original, thought-provoking content. Yes you can still cover the news, but cover it from the angle important to your audience.
3. Don’t kid yourself, Google sees the value in original content. Again, ignoring YouTube, a large percentage of Google’s revenue is given away to publishing partners. You can’t tell me that there aren’t people at Google eying the benefits of hosting original content and keeping more of that revenue for themselves.

As a person responsible for the traffic of a large IT News organization, this move does trouble me. But it also has some advantages. The duplicate content corrections Google is promising should have immediate impact on sites that already publish original news analysis and we should be able to move valuable content dollars away from syndicated news (that wasn’t driving that much traffic anyway) and into more profitable original reporting. Whatever happens, I’ll be keeping a very close eye on traffic from Google News and other content deals the “Search” company makes in the future.