Fast Flip to Strategic Media Dominance

Google has released Fast Flip, an interesting new way to read online news. As the NYT notes, Google believes current approaches are not optimal:

Fast Flip, which is based on Google News, tries to address what Google considers a major problem with news sites: they often are slow to load, and so they turn off many readers. Google, the leader in Web search services and advertising, argues that if reading news online was closer to the experience of scanning through physical newspapers or magazines, people would read more.

“Browsing news on the Web is much slower than it is in print,” said Krishna Bharat, a distinguished researcher at Google who developed Google News in 2002. “When it is fast, people will look at more news and more ads, and that’s something that publishers want to see.”

The way it works is this - each of the thumbnails on the screen (see picture above) is actually a link to a webpage. They are organised in horizontal rows, each row represents a grouping (eg All Webpages, Sports News, etc). The horizontal rows can be rapidly scrolled left - right to get to all the selections (there are more selections than appear on screen at any one time).

In essence its just putting pictures links where once there would have been word links, the idea being that this speeds up the browsing experience. In that respect it is a very interesting step in the user interface for online news and mass information handling in general (and maps to Bing trying visual search).

But there is a cunning plan in it as well, all in the name of speeding up your experience of course.....

The articles, which are images of Web pages that have been stripped of ads and other items that slow them down, load with scant delay. Readers can zoom into a specific section, publication or article. They can often read the majority of an article directly on Google, although if they click on it, they will be taken to the publisher’s Web site.

In other words, why go to the original site, or see its Ads? Of course, this will all be done for the Greater Good:

Google plans to place display ads alongside the stories and share the resulting revenue with publishers. Mr. Bharat declined to discuss what percentage of the revenue will be kept by Google but said publishers would receive the majority.

And as for the Olde Media, are they falling for it?

“Of course there is a concern,” said Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations for The New York Times Company. “That doesn’t mean you don’t participate.”

He added that Fast Flip could help showcase sites like The New York Times better than current aggregators like Google News do.

“The interesting thing about this service, when compared to search, is that there is a revenue model for us on Google,” said Scott Havens, vice president of digital strategy and operations for The Atlantic.

Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell, said that the decision by Google to begin paying publishers for news content on its site is a significant change. “It is a chink in Google’s armor,” Mr. Doctor said. “It could be a path to peace and rationalization of the relationship.”

While the experiment includes some major publishers, several of the top newspaper chains, including the News Corporation, Gannett, McClatchy, Tribune and MediaNews, are not part of it.

That the Olde Media are in this position today is largely because they have been pretty incompetent in dealing with the 'Net for the last 10 years, falling for a classic strategic honeyed beartrap like this would imply they are no wiser today. Mr Murdoch, no matter what you think of his media empire, is no f*ckwit*, and he ain't on the list of participants.

(Update - Fake Eric Schmidt sends up Fast Flip with same conclusions as ours at The ToryGraph)

*Australian technical term for strategically incompetent media executive