In mid-September, Google surprised its fans with a new service: FastFlip. A user already familiar with Google News will find a few similar elements, but FastFlip takes the experience to a new level, both on a desktop and on a mobile device, allowing users to “browse news like a magazine”.

FastFlip attempts to lower the time it takes to load pages filled up with high-resolution pictures, videos, or commercial. According to Google’s researcher Mr. Krishna Bharat http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/read-news-fast-with-google-fast-flip.html, what the company intended to offer its users with this service is the opportunity to quickly flip through about three dozen publications. The pages are stripped of the slow-loading items, present the first page in an article, and allow the user to continue reading the piece, should he so desire, by accessing a link to the source publication.

Meanwhile, Google places ads on the side of the page and promises to share the ad revenue with the publishers of the content that appears on FastFlip. Based on the same type of ranking and search algorithms that have made the company successful, Google will calculate an amount to be paid to these publishers for the contextually relevant ads.

Most newspapers have been facing a significant drop in advertising revenue in the past several years, a trend that was further aggravated by the current economic situation. In addition, the continually decreasing number of paid subscriptions is further hurting the print media, while online content is freely accessible – and preferred by more and more users. Hurt on two fronts, newspapers have tried to come up with other sources of income, but a clear strategy has not yet been determined. Newscorp took a decisive step and announced in July http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a_DxphTycoDM that it will start charging for most of its online content. The Wall Street Journal, owned by the same company, is currently offering a mix of free and paid access to its articles.

With these concerns in mind, it seems that Google’s FastFlip came up to join forces with the print media companies to help increase their revenues by a mutually advantageous deal that involves providing aggregate news to Google’s users while making money from the traditional Google business, then sharing this income with the providers of the articles, namely the media trusts http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/blogs/bizfeed/172056/google_fast_flip_bridges_digital_and_print_media.html. A question mark appears when, flipping through the list of partner publications, one can see the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, along with magazines like Cosmopolitan or The Atlantic – but no Newscorp publications can be found. Of course, it is possible that the company is still negotiating with Google, but it is more likely that Newscorp trusts more its newly developed model of charging for online subscriptions than the advertising income offered by FastFlip, at least for now.

It will be interesting, as time goes by, which turns out to be the better option: shared advertising revenue with FastFlip, or paid content on Newscorp’s model.  On one hand, if Rupert Murdoch’s trust turns out to be the only one charging for online access to the published articles, it may be simply that the readers will turn away from it and go instead for the free access to Newscorp’s competition, thus tremendously hurting it. On the other hand, it is possible for the publications accessible through FastFlip to not benefit as much as they expect to from the ads included by Google, and thus further hurt to the point that they are forced to either disappear from the market or turn to a paid online subscription of the Newscorp type.

Another round of absentees from Google’s FastFlip is represented by the local newspapers, but they may be included later, as the service expands. After all, the service is still very new. Google’s next step could be to include a local list of publications in FastFlip, along with the current selection of topics, sections, and popular pages. This would likely increase the chances of survival for the local papers, which are even more hurt than the national ones, given their smaller advertising revenue and subscription base. In addition, it would further underline the fact that the future of newspapers will no longer be tied up to the paper as delivery media, as most publications are already using both online and print versions.

It is worth mentioning that Google already has a news aggregator, named simply Google News, which aggregates the newest and most popular information and provides direct links to the original publisher of the content and thus to the entire article. Of course, this is nothing new on the web, as Yahoo! and AOL also have news services, just to name a couple. Yet Google took the model one step further, thus identifying a way to include the advertising and to co-interest the parties, while also relying on simplicity and visual appeal as the news content is presented in easy to browse pictures of the actual article page in its respective publication.

The “visual” part is where Microsoft also planned to attract users, with its Bing search engine now offering a revolutionary method of finding content: through images. Currently, the search categories that allow the image search do not extend to news and articles, while Bing’s news section is not that different from the other online aggregators to pose a threat to Google’s FastFlip. However, Bing is expanding and positioning itself as a “decision engine”, thus frontally attacking Google’s leader position in searches. How successful it will be is hard to guess, as Bing Visual Search has a lot of ground to cover to catch up with Google.

As far as the news and relationships with publications go, Google clearly has the first mover advantage in what seems like a potentially profitable endeavor for all parts involved. If this works out and the newspapers significantly increase their income, Bing might have a hard time closing a similar deal.