Has Google gone flipping mad?

By Davey Winder
Tuesday, 15 September 2009 13:59

Home IT

With the launch of Fast Flip, Google says it is bringing a new reading experience to users of Google News. We say it's not new, it certainly ain't pretty and it's just a little bit bonkers. The concept is a simple one according to Google: "Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers".

Google insists that "flipping through content is very fast" and say that this means you can "quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting".

Fast Flip is, Google hopes, the future of magazine and newspaper style content online. Not to mention revenue streams. By introducing Fast Flip through Google Labs the search giant is testing an interesting ad revenue generation theory.

The New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and Salon amongst others will share contextually relevant ad revenue from the service. Think of it as the bait in order to get those publishers hooked into allowing Google to provide access to full page content.

Krishna Bharat, a Distinguished Researcher with Google News, says it will test the theory that "being able to read articles faster means people will read more of them, driving more ad revenue to publishers".

Possibly. However, it seems unlikely that Google has found the magic bullet to save traditional print media publications. After all, what it is really doing is aggregating news as it has always done, just more of it and giving a little more of any revenue away.

So what is actually wrong with Fast Flip and why has Google gone mad if it thinks this is the future of online news? More on page 2...

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