Search and advertising juggernaut Google introduced self-served news articles from four press associations over the last few days.
The company has signed deals with the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association (UK) and The Canadian Press to allow its news sub-site to host images and articles rather than link through to secondary sites.
This follows a dispute several months back between Agence France-Presse and Google, when the AFP got arsey because Google was reproducing its copyrighted content.
Evidently that dispute is in the past, the AFP quite happily accepting Google's payments (no doubt exactly the resolution the AFP was originally looking for).
This marks an interesting shift in Google's information delivery strategy, which used to rely on sending people to the right places. Now it can keep a hold of readers - for some stories at least.
And with the number of stories the four associations in question produce - that's quite a lot of Google-hosted reading. Potentially, anyway.
Such stories are reproduced by many publications the world-over, which means that Google could be snatching readers from a plethora of websites.
But Google isn't completely abandoning secondary news sources. A perusal of the Google News web page yields just one or two self-hosted stories, and even those continue to include a list of sites all running the same or similar story.
Still, what's the ratio of clicks on the "main" link for a story against all the other listed sites?
Get ready for some whining editors!
HEXUS links
Sydney Morning Herald's coverage of the story.
Google News - See if you can spot the changes.
