Suddenly the world at large seems to have woken up to the fact that ad-funded delivery doesn’t work as a business model for large-scale web publishing. Worse, the big beasts of print publishing, the brand-name newspapers, are effectively forced to cut their own throats by providing their print content online for free. 

Rubbing salt in the wounds is Google News, the simple aggregation portal that is managing to make money from the newspapers’ content that it is using for free (aka “stealing”).  Some publishers are even threatening to withdraw access to their content unless Google starts paying them.

So is Google a villain here? And can the ad-funded revenue model be made to work?

At first sight, reading Google’s recent response and defence of its role at the US Congress Hearing on the Future of Journalism  seems to be an excellent example of totally missing the point. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president in charge of Google News, gives an interesting insight into how to boost your ranking (create a single Wikipedia-style topic page rather than multiple repetitive stories) but completely ignores the thrust of the complaints ie that Google is making money from sites that aren’t.

On reflection however, it’s actually the newspapers that have completely missed the point. By its very nature, advertising only works if you have traffic, and the only way to get traffic is through centralized search, which effectively means Google. That’s just the way the web works.

In other words there is real advertising money on the internet (just look at Google) but it’s very localized (although in a global sort of way). If you want to make real money from advertising the only way is to follow Mayer’s advice and do everything you can to make sure that you’re on Google’s front page for as many key term searches as possible.

The real irony is that Google News, the web newspapers’ new hate figure, is actually their best friend. By ordering content based on time of posting rather than page ranking, it provides a level-playing field ensuring that news-oriented traffic is distributed far more evenly around all publishers. 

And that gives all aggregated sites the golden opportunity to persuade visitors from anywhere in the world to sign up to their RSS feeds (you do have a RSS feed don’t you?) based on the quality, type and tone of the content they provide. They might even be able to persuade some of these Google-delivered visitors to pay for value-added content and so open up more traditional revenue streams.

I’m not arguing that all is rosy in the web publishing world – it clearly isn’t (and it’s a subject I plan to return to). However Google isn’t the problem and, for a lucky few, it is the solution.