AP offers to sell the hot news while it’s still hot

Hot news available to the highest bidder or the one’s most willing to cough up the money to be first in line. That’s the newest money making idea to come out of the Associated Press. The idea is that the AP will sell news stories to some of their more exclusive online customers for a certain period of time ahead of their competitors.

AP’s Chief executive, Tom Curley uses the tired old excuse that sites like Google have been reaping fortunes off of AP’s articles, photos and video without fair compensation.

Curley said the new products the AP is exploring include premium-priced information on certain topics.

And, he added, “products can be reserved, and there can be exclusives given, perhaps on a time-base measure. Those who get access to that content and the rich multimedia or metadata that comes with it might get an exclusive for, oh, 20 or 30 minutes.”

Source: AP/Google News – AP might charge some customers to get news earlier

Tie this in with their idea for some sort of news registry that will be used to track unauthorized use of their news and the AP believes that it will be able to recoup the tens of millions of dollars that they have lost over the years.