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Greg Jarboe at Search Engine Watch relates some interesting statistics about the poularity of Google News versus Yahoo’s and AOL’s news products.
Google News, it seems, has an audience of about 8.6 million unique visitors per month, while AOL boasts 21.1 million and Yahoo has 34.4 million. Yet Google News apparently garners 65 percent of media coverage. I didn’t know this; thanks for the info, Greg.
Greg gets some feedback on this phenomenon from Mark Glaser, execs at Google and AOL, and some other fine folks, but nobody menions the elephant in the room: Bloggers are more likely to write about Google News because a) it’s Google, and b) they’re more likely to be linked to from Google News, especially if their blog is part of a network or staffed publication.
And reason c): To the best of my knowledge, Google News is the only Internet news service to be sued in the last year.
Google made a bet four years ago that blogs would eclipse traditional media in terms of the sheer volume of publishing. Almost every search decision it’s made since then has incorporated that trend. Not only are bloggers’ finances tied to Google’s beneficence, but also bloggers’ egos.