Outsell report confirms newspapers' fears
Jinfo Blog

20th January 2010

By Penny Crossland

Item

Google News has been countering the print industry’s accusations of content theft with claims that the search engine in fact provides publishers with significant revenue by sending news sites in excess of four billion clicks per month. It has also come up with schemes such as First-click and Fast-flip (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27361 and http://www.vivavip.com/go/e24414) which were supposed to entice online readers of news to click through to the publishers' sites. However, the latest News Users Report published by Outsell (http://digbig.com/5bayhe) seems to vindicate the publishers‘ claims that Google’s news aggregator is taking readers away from their sites. The report has found that a full 44% of Google News visitors just scan the headlines and do not bother to click through to the original news site. This means that newspapers are losing out on click-through traffic and ultimately on vital advertising revenue. The report further found that readers of news are more likely to go to an aggregator (31%) than to a newspapers‘ digital edition (8%) for their news and that only 10% of users would be willing to pay for digital access to news. Outsell’s report, which contains data from 2,787 US news users found that 57% of those surveyed go to online sources for news, rather than to print sources. This means that publishers will have to come up with schemes to drive traffic to their sites – online traffic has become crucial to their survival. However, introducing paywalls for news is not the answer either. It would seem that publishers are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

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