HACKER Q&A
📣 mostertoaster

How valuable an asset is Google News?


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?

  👤 alexmingoia Accepted Answer ✓
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
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.