HN Explorer

Ask HN: How valuable an asset is Google News?

1 points by mostertoaster ↗ HN
For me, after HN, I just habitually have google news as my goto for news articles.

If they chose to sell it because of whatever reason, how much money would it cost to acquire?

It seems like a sure way to make money, if the news displayed was pay to show up, but if it is just an unbiased algorithm, then maybe it wouldn’t be so valuable?

5 comments

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mostertoaster
Though in terms of being an information source, it pales in value to Wikipedia.

If that was ever funded primarily by one of the big tech companies or the government, I think id become a conspiracy theorist thinking I’m living in 1984.

alexmingoia
Probably very little. Without the Google brand, URL, and link from google.com the traffic would disappear.

Did you know Google News is actually just a front-end for RSS feeds? Most of the value is in their tagging by category and geographic region.

If you're interested in reading aggregated news, check out https://sumi.news, it's an alternative interface I built to read news on one page, one day at a time.

mostertoaster
Well I’ll say seeing the site for like 5 minutes - I already like it better than google news.

Thanks for building it!

mostertoaster
Also - do you think google makes any many from google news.

Maybe not directly, but maybe the algorithm as to what to display can be slightly “biased”, through the right channels, the one in which causes more money/control to flow google’s way.

Maybe if sold it wouldn’t be worth much, but how much. Slur is it worth to google, if the brand name stayed with it how much would it take for them to sell?

alexmingoia
I don’t think they make any money from Google News. I don’t see any ads. I think ads may give them trouble from the news companies.

Google is already practically printing money from ads on search results.

How much could they make if they sold it? Hard to say without revenue or traffic numbers.