Month: June 2005

Google Inc. this year plans to offer an electronic-payment service that could help the Internet-search company diversify its revenue and may heighten competition with eBay Inc.’s PayPal unit, according to people familiar with the matter.

Exact details of the search company’s planned service are not known. But the knowledgeable people say it could have similarities with PayPal, which allows consumers to pay for purchases on Web sites by funding electronic-payment accounts from their credit cards or checking accounts. Some consumers like PayPal for the security it offers, since it allows them to share their banking or credit-card numbers only with PayPal without having to divulge the information to merchants.

I’ve been on about this for a long time, how Yahoo and Google can and should be the distributor of choice for the publishing industry, if the publishers can only get out of their own way with regards to their old business models. It’s the music industry and digital distribution story all over again. Consumers want their music a la carte, but it took the labels forever to ween themselves off the pre-packaged delivery system of CDs. But sell songs the way consumers want to buy them, and for less, and all of a sudden you will see a massive uptake in purchasing, as well as new models like subscription.

Well, the same can be said of publisher’s content. Especially stuff like LexisNexis, or Thompson/Gale, or the Wall Street Journal. Yahoo today announced that they have cut deals with all these publishers, among others, to include their content, or at least summaries of it, in Yahoo searches (some are forthcoming, others are in at launch). Yahoo is calling this services “Yahoo Search Subscriptions.” Unfortunately, the publishers are not letting Yahoo do what, really, Yahoo should be doing, which is acting as a central clearinghouse for transactions and subscription fulfillment/services. You still have to manage your sub with each individual publisher, which is way too much friction to activate the long tail user of paid content. But it’s a step, and I think once the publishers dip their feet in, they’ll realize the water is just fine.

In essence, publishers are terrified that if they allow their content into search engines, they’ll never get paid for it, and they’ll lose the relationship with the customer to boot. The database aggregators like LexisNexis, In particular, are wary of search. But if I could find LexisNexis articles in a Yahoo search, and easily click through and read them for a small fee (or a Rhapsody like option that lets me buy an unlimited sub for say $10 a month), why, I’d do it all day long. But don’t ask me to log in to LexisNexis each time. Let Yahoo handle that. And don’t make me pay $5 for each article. I’ll never do it.

Paid Content coverage notes that no money is yet changing hands, it’s simply a hand off between Yahoo and content partners. That is silly. When will publishers realize that Yahoo is the new newsstand, and they’ve earned their cut?

Gary has a long and well thought out overview here.

Press release in extended entry.

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This is a thread at Kuro5hin, a tech/culture site. It also gives an overview of companies Google has already purchased, and speculation on companies Google might buy (Koders, T’rati, Answers…most of them you’ve read about here….)

BTW, who will buy MySpace?