Six prominent French newspapers are joining forces to create an online news site in competition with Google News. France’s National Daily Press Union announced the plan yesterday and said the virtual newsstand will be launched in September.
Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro, Les Echos, Le Parisien and L’Equipe are planning to develop and finance the virtual newsstand, and they expect other newspapers and magazines to join the project. The group is also trying to obtain state subventions offered to the press by the Sarkozy administration, according to ABC.es.
The Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog states that the French newspapers are unhappy with Google’s unwillingness to share ad revenues from Google News, and that this is their solution – to launch a paid news service of their own, circumventing Google’s news aggregation system since Google refused them a percentage of the ads revenues. According to SFN:
“The content’s price will be fixed by each daily and several subscription packages to either individual articles or an entire publication will be offered. “The monetization of the web contents, which has been agreed on by the editorial groups, is the main priority,” Les Echos explained.”
One of the newspapers said yesterday that monetizing the news content is the main goal of this new web site.
Meanwhile, Google is reportedly developing NewsPass, a micropayment system that would presumably allow allow papers to charge for content found in Google News and Google search. Referencing a well known Italian newspaper, paidContent describes NewsPass like this:
“La Repubblica says that, with Newspass, people will be able to log-in to the sites of participating news publishers using a single login. Publishers will be able to designate what type of payment they want to accept, including subscriptions and micropayments. People who find content from participating publishers in Google search will see a paywall icon next to that content and be able to purchase access directly from there using Checkout.”
In response to SearchEngineLand’s coverage of the ongoing story, Google shared an unsolicited statement about the French initiative:
“We welcome new attempts to find technologies and business models that will help journalism flourish online. We value quality journalism, which is why we work with news partners around the world to help them attract bigger audiences and generate revenue. That’s what Google News is all about, and we’re happy to see any new experimentation and innovation in this space.”
Tags: advertising, France, Google News