Google Building Digital Archives of Magazine Content

Magazine publishers now have the option of having search giant Google scan their back issues—at Google's expense—and getting a cut of revenue generated in return.

But don't quit those circulation marketing or ad sales jobs just yet. Although the revenue potential is sketchy at this point, no one's counting on a windfall.

Still, publishers who are early participants see other possible benefits, including traffic generation for their Web sites.

The background: Having settled its messy online-availability legal differences with book publishers, Google recently began striking similar agreements for making magazines available through its Google Book Search.

Book publishers filed a class-action suit against Google for digitizing and making available the full text of books still in copyright, without permission or financial sharing. Google maintained that its practice of indexing the full text but showing only small portions of text in search results constituted fair use. Google lost, but has now reached a $125-million settlement with the book industry (not yet finalized by the court) in which a publisher agrees to have its issues scanned and indexed for search in return for a cut of revenue.

The revenue is ad-driven. As with other Google searches, when a user clicks into a magazine article or book generated by a Google Book search, topic-related ads are generated, appearing next to the content. (A publisher can also opt out of having ads shown.)

One report said that the archiving deals call for Google to get 37% and the publisher (and author, in the case of books) to get 63% of any revenue generated. However, Zinio EVP and chief marketing officer Jeanniey Mullen notes that it appears that there may be "a couple of layers of monetization." (Mullen points out that Zinio’s digital archives of millions of articles in more than 50,000 magazine issues are searchable through the Zinio Inside application on its site, and also appear in standard Google searches.)

Eventually, the Google-scanned magazine content will be available through standard Google searches, as well as through Book Search.

There is no way to access a comprehensive list or index of all magazines that are partnering with Google and have been archived, but issues of at least 40 different titles are already online. (Some may not be full-archive deals.) Nearly all appear to be consumer titles, including Popular Science, New York, Ebony, Jet, Prevention, Men's Health, Women's Health, Runner's World, Bicycling, Popular Mechanics,Vegetarian Times, Log Home Living, Cincinnati, Maximum PC and Baseball Digest. On the professional side, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is a ground-breaker.

The lack of an index of magazines is by design, since Google wants articles to be found through word or phrase searches—although the company told Searchengineland.com that it might consider creating a list of the magazines archived if there's sufficient demand from publishers. Users of Advanced Book Search will find an option to select content just from "magazines," but must then define the search by a topic key word or inserting the title of a specific magazine. The latter pulls up a list of links into a magazine’s issues that appear to be in no particular order.

However, once a user is in a magazine article, there is an option to "browse all issues" of that magazine. This brings the user into the magazine's Book Search home page, where it's possible to select a year, view all covers from that year, and simply click into the desired issue.

The user experience on Book Search is rather rudimentary in comparison with digital magazine editions. The often-grainy images of pages in an issue sometimes appear as spreads, but frequently as single pages, stacked on top of one another and accessed via a back/forth arrow, by inputting the page number or by scrolling down and up. Interactivity within an issue's pages is limited, although some magazines' contents pages have HTML links to specific articles. (Click here to view Google's explanation of the magazine initiative and examples of how it works.)

Bob Cohn, consumer marketing director for Popular Science publisher Bonnier Corp., says that the company isn't banking on significant revenue from the partnership with Google. However, Bonnier also sees other upsides, including no-cost digitization of the magazine's huge archives (an initiative that would be cost-prohibitive for the publisher) and traffic-building for its Web site. "We figure it's bound to increase page views to some degree, and that is of course always a plus for online ad sales purposes," Cohn says.

A third benefit lies in generation of some subscription orders via the subscription link that's included on the side of magazine articles, he notes.

Google also plans to allow publishers to have a version of magazine search that can appear for their own publications, on their own Web sites, according to Searchengineland.

On a separate front, Google recently announced that it has discontinued the Google Print Ads program. That program began in 2005 with efforts to sell fractional print ads in magazines via auctions, then shifted to focusing on newspaper advertising. Though Google had more than 800 newspaper partners, its ROI clearly didn't pan out.

In the company's blog, Google's director for the Print Ads program stated that it will continue to "devote a team of people to look at how we can help newspaper companies" with "innovative online solutions that will have a meaningful impact for users, advertisers and publishers." -- Karlene Lukovitz