Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News is adding to the list of news agencies it aggregates and will soon being serving contextual ads around their stories as part of revenue-sharing deals. In the next few weeks the news search site will add text and pictures from from eight more national agencies, all members of the European Pressphoto Agency. They are: Spanish and Latin America agency EFE; LUSA, which covers Portugal and Brazil; Keystone in Switzerland; APA in Austria, MTI in Hungary, PAP in Poland; Greece’s ANA and Belgium’s Belga.
Google added AP, AFP, PA and Canadian Press stories in 2007 and created hosted news pages for them — that’s what the newly added agencies will get, but all hosted news sites including AP and AFP will over the coming days be given contextual ads. As with the previous additions, Google says it will now be able to link directly to each agency’s content via their hosted news pages, instead of returning multiple versions of the same story in each search result, as news media across the the world copy and aggregate the news to their own sites. Release.
Having trialled ads on Google News in the US, this will be the first time Google will serve European adverts; the deal represents its biggest roll-out of advertising on its search or aggregated content so far.
It’s a good deal for Google, which expands its hosted news coverage into eastern and southern Europe at a stroke, and for the agencies that have a new platform for monetising their expensive news operations. But many amongst the agencies’ customers may look on with trepidation as Google ramps up its market share of news traffic across Europe and hosts more of the content that online newspapers, portals and other aggregators rely on each day to fill their pages.
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