Google Said to Be Planning a Paid-Content System for Newspapers

Google and news organizations haven’t been seeing eye to eye very much lately. Some traditional news outlets have gone as far as accusing the company of ‘stealing’ their content with Google News or even through the search engine. For its part, Google has tried to make peace, though it hasn’t been too forthcoming in what the publishers really want, to be paid. Still, there are reports of another peace offering from Google, one that we’ve heard of before and that is said to be getting closer to completion.

A report in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica says that Google is now wooing publishers and asking them to sign up for a new product that it calls Newspass. Basically, it’s a paid-content system that works on an a la carte as well as a subscription basis. News stories published through it would be behind a paywall, but will still be discoverable through searches or news aggregators.

But anyone wanting to read the actual stories would have to pay up, a small amount obviously, depending on what the publishers see fit. News outlets also have the option of a subscription system.

Google presented such a system to news organizations last year. Now, it looks like plans are well underway to make it a real product, though Google obviously needs publishers to sign up. A paywall is the solution contemplated or put in practice by plenty of traditional news organizations that have seen their print revenues dwindle without their online ones making up the difference.

Many now claim that users have had a free ride for too long, if you don’t consider the ads present on any outlet, of course, and even that search engines and news aggregators should be paying the news organizations for promoting their content. It’s a convoluted logic, but things are looking pretty bad for the newspaper industry, so the reactions are understandable up to a point.

Google has been trying to get publishers to ‘see the light’ and realize that online advertising does pay. With almost $25 billion in yearly revenue mostly from advertising, Google is the best example of this. But, at the same time, it’s also trying to provide publishers with the tools they have been asking for themselves, which is where Newspass comes in. If the rumors are solid, as they appear to be, there should be more info on the product soon enough. For now, Google is not commenting. [via PaidContent]