Despite no ads or any obvious revenue generation, Google News is worth $100 million to Google, according to VP Marissa Mayer.
How does zero equal $100 million? As one of Google’s many for free peripheral services, enough people sort of ride the Google wave over to the search engine from the News page. In Google’s estimation, all that referral traffic is worth a pretty penny.
An angle like that sort of puts in perspective what the search giant gets out of its colossal new product fail rate: a few things that stick and send people over to the money pot. Google’s a portal (a media portal, at that), as many have argued for years, and portals require some side activities to keep the consumer engaged.
Hot Trends, for example, even gives you the terms to search for. Smart, eh?
Google Health? Consider that a branding freebie; Google decided correctly contextual ads for Preparation H next a hemorrhoids diagnosis wouldn’t just bring bad PR, but was also a little creepy. Need a lawyer for the mesothelioma problem?
Yeah, probably good Google said no thanks to that. Internally, they probably figure Google Health helps facilitate searches on the users’ own terms.
Hard to say what it means exactly, but Mayer’s valuation is also interesting considering the rumored price tag on Digg.com. If Digg sells to Google for $200 million, is that an admission Digg’s worth twice as much Google News?
Guess we’ll see.
