Google hosts AP, death knell for wire services
Entry updated Feb. 12, 2008 at 6:01 p.m.
I publish an entry about wire services being obsolete and look what happens!
In all seriousness, the news yesterday of Google hosting wire content from providers The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association in the United Kingdom and The Canadian Press instead of linking out exclusively to wire service members (mainstream media), and to a lesser extent CNN dropping their use of Reuters to cut costs and invest in their own content, has sounded the death knell for wire services.
The Google news is the more significant of the two events as it could reduce traffic to newspaper and other media companies' Web sites where wire stories and photos are also found -- a development that could reduce those companies' revenue from online advertising. Here is an example story of a Google-hosted AP story.
Also, see the Wii News Channel.
And just like most of Google's other services and applications, the company reserves the right to run its ads alongside the content though this is not happening currently.
Google also announced a change called "duplicate detection," explained here:
Duplicate detection means we'll be able to display a better variety of sources with less duplication. 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. Of course, if you want to see all the duplicates on other publisher websites with additional analysis and context, they're only a click away.
This means (I think) Google will be burying the many duplicate wire stories surfacing on Google News -- this could dry up the stream of random traffic once flowing to wire service members' sites -- and replacing them with the Google-hosted wire story with links to the original story.
And since this move by Google rewards those original content providers, it seems prudent that newspapers and other information gathering operations stop their use of wire content and reinvest it in their own operations.
CNN gets it. Do you?
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