Watch out Rupert! - YouTube wants to be top news destination

Stuart Corner
Monday, 26 May 2008 07:54

Opinion and Analysis

According to Ross Dawson, CEO of consulting firm Advanced Human Technologies, traffic from search engines provides a significant proportion of online media income. "In some cases up to one third of traffic to online news sites comes from search engines. With the primary revenue from most online news coming from advertising, search engine optimisation is not an optional activity for news sites and editors," he said in a recent blog entry.

There is no law that says the likes of Google have to provide a level playing field - so if it ramps up its own news generating activities it would seem very likely that these will be given prominence above other news sources on Google News pages.

There are other ties between news and search engines that could be exploited. When Heath Ledger was found dead Australian newspapers had a head start on the rest of the world thanks to time differences, but the Sydney Morning Herald did not rely solely on this, a search engine friendly headline (Heath Ledger dies) and search engine optimisation to maximise hits. According to blogger Trevor Cook "the SMH marketing team swung into operation to bid at auction for the right to own key search terms (like Heath Ledger dies) for those critical few hours between news of his death and the algorithms taking over.

And Google has not even begun to exploit the potential of adding value to journalistic content - citizen or otherwise. News always happens somewhere, so linking the location of a news event to Google Maps is an obvious one. The company's stated mission is "organising the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful." You would have to say that gathering news 'at source' fits admirably with this mission. The question is: how far up the news 'value chain' will Google's ambitions extend?

I would be very surprised if it plans to stop at "a good-natured attempt at empowering citizens to tell stories."