Google News: ads please, but don’t ask for payment for news stories as refusal often offends

Remem­ber Peter Osnos? He was gunned down for sug­gest­ing that Google be asked to pay for news con­tent. (To me a least, an argu­ment roughly akin to beat­ing on Ida Tar­bell for sug­gest­ing that Stand­ard Oil be broken up.)

Remem­ber these argu­ments?

# Google car­ries no news­pa­per con­tent itself, bey­ond head­lines, a few words and links. It sends people to con­tent on news­pa­per sites–in fact, roughly 20–30 per­cent of traffic to most news­pa­per sites comes from Google. In other words, people aren’t read­ing news­pa­per stor­ies on Google; they’re using it to find stor­ies on news­pa­per sites. Odds are they wouldn’t have got­ten to those sites in any other way. News­pa­pers should be thank­ing Google for that traffic.

# Google News, no doubt a big part of Osnos’ ima­gin­ary bogey­man and a key driver of that traffic to news­pa­per sites, car­ries no advert­ising. Check it out.

And again:

Let’s take one of the most obvi­ous points: Google News doesn’t carry advert­ising, so there are no “advert­ising rev­en­ues gen­er­ated by use of their stor­ies” for the news industry to get “a sig­ni­fic­ant slice” of (there is refer­ral rev­enue, but that’s a step removed, and requires a dif­fer­ent argument).

Now?

If you’re in the US, start­ing today you may notice some­thing a bit dif­fer­ent when you search Google News.

Last Novem­ber, we announced plans to begin exper­i­ment­ing with ads on a num­ber of Google prop­er­ties, includ­ing news query refine­ments within Google search. Today, we’re con­tinu­ing a sim­ilar exper­i­ence for users by intro­du­cing ads on Google News search-results pages in the US. What this means is that when you enter a query like iPhone or Kindle into the Google News search box, you’ll see text ads along­side your News search res­ults — sim­ilar to what you see on reg­u­lar Google searches or Google Book Search.

Ho hum.