Google Inside

Recently, I’ve been trying out some new ways to stay informed of upcoming and current news. Particularly this time, I setup some new alerts for specific keywords to help me stay more informed about certain niche parts of the technology industry. It’s been working great so far.

It has indeed been working great, but I found a problem. Google News feeds from all sorts of different sites. Both paid subscription news and free news sources.

Why should Google News drop paid sources?

The answer is simple. Google News should drop paid sources because they don’t serve a purpose for consumers. Here we go again, but let’s take a look at Google’s mission statement. “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It’s clear cut and to the point.

So I can see them thinking that even offering news excerpts from paid subscription news sites as a means of “organizing the world’s information,” but it’s not entirely. If you want to access that “information,” you need to pay for a subscription to that site.

There are three solutions for this problem.

1. Offer a “free” viewing of the recent article for X amount of time, such as 24 or 48 hours from the time it was published — only being allowed to access it through Google News.
2. Offer an option to only see news alerts that offer freely viewed content, excluding all paid subscription feeds.
3. Drop paid subscriptions feeds and only offer news content that is freely available to the world.

Paid subscriptions rarely render new subscriptions for people that are just trying to stay up on one topic. If I had the money to go buy a subscription for every news site out there, I simply wouldn’t have the time to even read the content anymore.

I feel Google needs to rethink this business plan and re-evaluate how they are distributing feeds.