In another move to try and keep visitors on their website, Google recently announced that they have started hosting their own news using the AP and three other sources.
This change is expected to hurt media sources that traditionally have received traffic from the search engine giant. This in turn is likely to damage their advertising revenues because of the drop in “internet eyeballs.”
Google has spent the last 2 years negotiating contracts with the AP and the French News Agency after some commotion about copyright infringements for publishing their content online without permission. Google also negotiated agreements with The Press Association and The Canadian Press .
Financial terms were not disclosed. For the time being, they don’t have plans to run their advertising program on their hosted news site, but I’m inclined to think that will soon change – Google very rarely sees a webpage that it doesn’t want to run Adsense on, especially if they directly profit from it.
What are your thoughts on Google hosting news?