Google considered buying newspaper
Google’s chief Eric Schmidt (pictured) has revealed the company considered getting into the newspaper publishing business. But he says he concluded Google should “avoid crossing the line between the infrastructure and technology that Google provides and the content that our partners provide”
The revelation came in an interview with the Financial Times. Though it doesn’t appear in the text of the interview, separate reports say Schmidt also found potential titles for a buyout were either too expensive or had too many associated hassles. Reuters reports speculation that the New York Times was among the potential targets.
Schmidt also noted that Google is working on a project with the Washington Post to use its search technology to improve the online reading experience by learning about the type of stories that interest a particular user and giving more prominence to such topics when they visit the site.
Discussing the controversy over Google’s potential profiting by selling advertising on the Google News service, Schmidt appeared to rule out paying a share of revenue to sources featured on the site. “We’ve decided that the value we provide to the partners is the traffic. So we want to provide incredible numbers of users going to their sites, their content, which is why we urge them to make it deeper, stronger and use better tools and so forth.”
Asked about the recent talk that the Obama administration will step up enforcement of competition policy, Schmidt said Google was trying to avoid the “tragic” mistakes which he felt Microsoft had made. However, he argued that Google was less likely to encounter such problems as users could switch to a rival easily because it was “literally one click away.”
Schmidt also dismissed the idea that projected $600 million annual losses on YouTube would make the site an unsustainable investment. Pointing to the site’s large global audience he insisted “we will, over time, develop the advertising models and subscription models eventually that will make that a very good business for us.”
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