The Web is well on its way to eschewing the need for physical copies of print media to be produced. Who needs to buy a daily newspaper when all that content is available for free on the Internet? And in a more timely fashion than a daily-produced tome could ever hope to manage. Why then is Google attempting to bring magazine or newspaper-style reading to Web news?

The print media world is in a state of flux at the moment, undecided on how to counter or embrace the Web without harming its bottom line. Most newspapers and magazines now make at least some of their content available on the Internet, because they know not to is suicidal, and rely on revenue from advertising to make it work. But many, especially Rupert Murdoch and his News Corps. properties, are keen on alternatives.

Whether a purely advertising-based model or charging for content is the answer, it’s clear than print media is in a slow but sustained slide to death, with the Web becoming all-important. While Google is seen as the bad guy in all this, with its aggregation of news content, it is looking to the print media world for alternatives on how to deliver content. It’s answer? Google Fast Flip.

Google states:

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. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting.

The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet. However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution.

Google Fast Flip is currently part of Google Labs, although if popular amongst both publishers and readers it will likely become a full part of Google. It pulls content from a range of big-name and well-established publishers and presents the articles in the style of a magazine, with easy flipping (hence the name) possible between stories.

The “fast” comes due to the stories being cached and ready to read instantly, with no loading of multimedia content required. Around 40 publishers, including the BBC, The New York Times, Salon, and Newsweek, are involved with the launch, although Google hopes this number will expand in the future. But even it it does, it’s unlikely to ever match the 25,000 sources used for generating Google News content.

The important part of Google Fast Flip, and the reason the 40 initial publishers have signed up to be a part of it, is the revenue sharing. Adverts will be served alongside the articles with revenue split between Google and the publisher of the article in question. Whether this is enough to save the newspaper and print media industry isn’t clear but it certainly cannot hurt. Even if it does amount to sleeping with the enemy.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 2:04 am under Google, Internet.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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