Media Will Benefit From Microsoft, Google Battle: AP
Google’s ongoing competition with Microsoft’s Internet search engine will ramp up the faltering media industry by helping it draw more revenue from online news, according to a statement by the head of US news agency the Associated Press.
AP President and CEO Tom Curley said that Microsoft’s decision in July to partner up with Yahoo in an effort to contend with Google, which currently dominates the online search market, made a huge difference in the way the traditional media adapts to the Internet.
Complaints have been made by newspaper executives saying that Google is able to reap the benefits from its popular news aggregation site Google News, while the industry garners little revenue from the service to which readers have free access.
"We stand at an enviable moment where Microsoft and Google have decided to go to war," Curley said in an address to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.
"And we who produce content can begin to figure out whether there’s an opportunity for us to help that sharing in a way that reverses the outflow of money from media and takes it back."
He also noted that the media industry could greatly benefit from more competition between the companies, and Microsoft’s plans to make news sources more reliable.
Curley did not criticize Google, but he did tell reporters that Microsoft has shown a keen ability to come up with ideas for improving on the profitability of online news.
He commented that AP was engaging in discussions with the software giant about its new Internet search technology, which includes features that let people surf the Web using image galleries rather than just text links.
He is expecting the new approach to improve the online news reading experience and even bring in revenue within three to fifteen months.
"I think you’ll see a lot more effort and a lot more announcements that are a lot more bullish from media companies than you have in the last decade," he said.
The AP is currently owned by 1,400 US newspapers but not wanting to be in circulation, there has been a decline in advertising revenue and Internet competition has destroyed the industry. There are now seven major companies that have gone bankrupt and 30,000 have been lost since 2007.
The AP introduced an industry initiative earlier this year in order to protect news content from unauthorized use online, such as a "news registry" that can track the use of its stories on the Internet.
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