Google plans to build a payment platform for newspapers that want to charge for digital content, a move that would deepen the search giant's involvement in micropayments and transaction platforms.
The company's plans are detailed in a document it sent to the Newspaper Association for America. The document, a response to a query from the association, also requested more information pertaining to paid-content models.
"While currently in the early planning stages, micropayments will be a payment vehicle available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year," explained the document posted on Wednesday by Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab.
The search company has been the target of harsh criticism from the newspaper industry (and other sectors of the publishing business) for profiting from third-party content, in that it gets advertising revenue from aggregating stories posted by publishers. Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson went so far as to call online news aggregators (not mentioning Google by name) "parasites or tech tapeworms".
The proposal is to aggregate payments into a bundle for processing, something that could quell publisher concerns about transaction fees.
"The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants and over time," the company said in the document.
"Google will mitigate the risk of non-payment by assigning credit limits based on past purchasing behaviour and having credit card instruments on file for those with higher credit limits and using our proprietary risk engines to track abuse or fraud. Merchant integration will be extremely simple."
The plan is preliminary, according to a statement that Nieman Lab said it received from Google on Wednesday.
"The Newspaper Association of America asked Google to submit some ideas for how its members could use technology to generate more revenue from their digital content, and we shared some of those ideas in this proposal," the statement to Nieman Lab said. "It's consistent with Google's effort to help publishers reach bigger audiences, better engage their readers and make more money."
Google's Checkout product, the online transaction service that would likely be the base for a micropayment system, has been around for a few years now. However, it hasn't made a huge impact against far bigger transcompetitor PayPal, and it has also been experiencing some problems.
