Google News click through rates – maybe newspapers have a point after all
I stopped buying newspapers years ago, and now access all the news I need through the Web. As do many other people in this digital age. However, the way we access that Web news content is still a contentious one. And it appears the newspapers may have a point about Google News and the like after all.
As has been discussed ad nauseum, there is currently a huge battle playing out as news coverage, and the way people access it, switches from traditional print media to the Web.
One of the big debates concerns whether news aggregators such as Google News are good or bad for news organizations trying to forge a presence on the Internet. While Google maintains it directs visitors to the news sources it aggregates, some newspapers, news organizations, and news proprietors (Rupert Murdoch et al) claim the search giant actually steals traffic away from them, and thus should be classed as competition.
And it appears they may have a valid argument, at least if you believe the latest News Users report from Outsell.
According to TechCrunch, the most significant finding in this, the third annual survey into how news is consumed in the U.S., both online and offline, is that 44 percent of Google News users never click through to the news source. Instead, they scan the headlines on Google News and leave it at that.
I find it hard to believe that many people do that on a regular basis. Sure, I scan masses of headlines and only click on a select few (the ones which interest me) but to rely on the short snippets on Google News for your entire news coverage seems a little over the top. Unless the Internet has turned us all into people with immeasurably short attention spans. Which is possible, I guess.
Other interesting snippets from the survey include: a distinct lack of willingness to pay for online news content, with 75 percent insisting they’d just switch source; 57 percent of users now turn to digital sources for their news, up from 33 percent a few years ago.
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January 20th, 2010
I click through sites that I know about, such as news.com.au, but I also use Google News. Some of the news from Google is simply a repitition of news from sites that I already visit, but a lot of the news is also from sites that I’ve never heard-of. I often then bookmark those sites and return directly. That is the benefit of Google that is not being discussed!
January 20th, 2010
I know many people who get all/most of their news from Twitter, so I won’t be surprised if there is a large group of people who rely on snippets on Google News for that as well… but that’s just an observation.