Outside the bundle, is hard news hard to monetise?

Today John Battelle points us to an important analysis from the East Bay Express, noting Google's habit of cutting ads from news pages that contain words included in its "sensitivity filter". Salon has apparently found that overtly sexual content kills Google's ads; others have found that editorial calling for a boycott of Sony, or dealing with "hard" but bloody news such as war or crime have fallen foul of the same filters. To paraphrase Will Self, Google seems to be conspiring to live quietly in a world where no-one shits, ejaculates or kills one another violently - a world safe perhaps for children, but wholly inappropriate to many necessary adult conversations.

Whether you see it as a necessary "family friendly" step, a nod to the commercial realities of what content advertisers are willing to appear alongside or just another bit of mindless bowdlerism, Google's selective approach to which news it will support with ads is a big deal. We know, of course, that the future of content is in smart aggregation (ppt from Umair). Only today Terry Heaton points to a new report (Mediapost) from In-Stat positing that the big winners in IPTV will be content aggregators, confirming once more that smart content strategies (B&C) will increasingly revolve around monetising packets of data as they become divorced from their traditional packages. The biggest news destination (Cyberjournalist) online is an aggregator. There is no escaping the fact that consumers, given the choice, are choosing content delivery platforms that sort for them by relevance and popularity.

So...if Google refuses to monetise packets of hard news, what future for hard news as we move from package to unbundled packet (Jay Small)? Celebrations at the deal between Google and AP (SEW) may well be premature if a monetised Google News is to include the same filters that omit much of what a reasonable adult would call news. The web is of course abuzz with speculation that the future of news is in not-for-profit NewAssignment, and the BBC remains shielded from commercial reality for at least another decade. But this is not the whole of the answer.

In fact, I think the prognosis relatively bright. What the market has taken away, the market will also provide. If hyper-sensitive Google will not run ads against packets of hard news, this merely opens up the market to an ad network with more intelligent, discriminating filters. Brand advertisers may well not want to advertise on the basis of context when that context is rape and genocide - but as the cult of AdWords never mentions, content is not the only way to match ads to consumers. Intelligent ad targeting does not begin and end with matching ads to content, but includes matching everything the publisher knows about the individual reader with relevant commercial messages. Classified advertisers, eBay sellers et al - those who need to reach a relevant audience - may go where Google ads will not.

Final thought: it is striking both how different and how similar the problem of monetising hard news is becoming to the problem of monetising MySpace and the social networks. Newspaper advertisers who have always been confident that their ads would sit alongside "serious" content shy away from exposing their brands to the drivel of teenage blogs. Now Google finds that the serious content of newspapers is perhaps a shade too serious for its network of advertisers. There is a middle ground to be realised here. Both the real needs of the advertisers, for solid return-on-investment advertising that reaches an attractive, relevant audience via serious content, and the real needs of news publishers for a commercial model that monetises news outside of the bundle, can be met a great deal better than Google proposes to with its catch-all censorship.