Summary
Google Long Honey Moon of Free Content Might Soon be Over. Newspaper Industry Turning into Digital Newspaper Industry and "Googlepaper Industry". New Approaches Sought in the Effort of Coupling High Demand Content with High Online Technology Solutions.
Analysis
Dow Jones Chief Executive Les Hinton is correct in his observation but not the first one to see the trend. Google was built, in the first place, based on the business model of "free content for search advertising", i.e. providing free content for all with the goal of attracting a critical mass of advertisers to use its for-profit proprietary search advertising model platform. And to this day it has worked successfully to the point that Google is now being called a "giant vampire sucking blood out of newspaper business".
But this scenario may soon be over. Being under tremendous pressure from the news market volatility and the increasing competition from the digital content and online media outlets such as Google and Yahoo, the newspaper industry is scrambling to find new ways of surviving.
There are two major trends being crystallized in the horizon: first, the newspaper industry is trying to put a stop to the "free for all online content" era and deny Google its "raw material" of "free Google content", and second, major news outlets are leading the way by trying to reengineer and go digital and adopting "pay per content" model.
Putting a stop to the "free for all online content" may involve two prong approach by the newspaper industry: the legal approach against Google for all the copyright content Google now uses, as well as forcing Google to profit sharing arrangements with the newspaper industry outlets for the copyright content Google agrees to use in its platform.
On the other hand, the newspaper industry must first reengineer itself in order to pave the way into the digital newspaper industry era.
Efforts are underway in this direction such as the Dow Jones new platform from which to conduct business on the web. But this trend may go even further. Major media and news outlets may try to mirror the Google business model to create their own "Googlepaper". In the future you might log on to the WSJ or NYT web portal to pay for their daily digital newspaper, but at the same time you may use WSJ or NYT own search engine to search news content of interest while matching ads are popping up on the side from the advertisers invited to use the for-profit WSJ or NYT search advertising model platform.
New approaches may also involve direct link of digital newspaper content to mobile devices on subscription basis, making the news content more user-friendly to news consumers. Furthermore, user-friendly digital content efforts may also lead to building a non-paper digital newspaper that one may easily carry in his/her bag, and that may easily fold and unfold to read at your own pleasure and convenience. Content to such a future paper-thin digital newspaper may be fed daily through a custom wireless network.
