14 DAY TRIAL // Newspapers have a habit of blaming Google for their financial troubles, especially online. And, since they can't or won't learn the most basic economic principles and revenue models online, Google is trying to help them make money or, at least, get them to warm up to the company. Google has just unveiled a new way of reading news online called Fast Flip. It aggregates stories from several sources, but shows them in a streamlined interface, which is fast and light on the bloat.
“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. At the same time, we provide aggregation and search over many top newspapers and magazines, and the ability to share content with your friends and community,” Google's Krishna Bharat wrote.
Of course, Google will tell you the new feature is to make it easier for people to read and discover new articles. And it's true, it is much faster than actually going through all the pages and it's also true that many websites, even those of large news sources, can be a bit heavy on the content, with all sorts of plugins and rich media. Fast Flip solves this problem by taking screenshots of the actual story on the site, but without the ads and all unnecessary elements. Users can then 'flip' through news articles from all the different sources, like they would with the pages of a newspaper or magazine.
But the real reason why Google is launching this solution has nothing to do with users or how they read the news. It has to do with getting the news industry off its back and, if it can generate a profit and maybe even be useful, all the better. The way it convinced news sources to go along with the project is by agreeing to share any revenue with the original sources, something newspapers have been clamoring on for years now. Ads will run alongside the articles and the ad revenue generated will be split with the content providers. Google, of course, isn't proclaiming it as the savior of the news industry and, in fact, most partners are skeptical, but it can't really hurt trying and the search giant has signed on heavy-hitters like New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, and Newsweek.