The days of visiting a library to load up the archives on the Microfiche Reader are nearly over and the device used for storing archives can finally be consigned there itself. Google has just launched News Archive Search, a service that makes newspaper archives fully searchable and readable in their original format.

The service looks good. But one issue I can see for publishers is how this might impact a publications ability to monetise their archives themselves, be that either via firstclick free, pay-per-view, subscriptions or advertising revenue. This is something that we have been discussing with one of the worlds biggest news publishers whom we work for, as currently archives can be an search engine optimisation treasure trove; probably that's one of Google incentives, they realise this too. However it appears there will be a new function for revenue generation within archive search:

"publishers will be able to generate incremental revenue from contextual advertising placed on News archive search pages"

Details on the website are a bit vague...that sentence in total actually, so it will be interesting to compare how the contextual ad revenue from Google Archive Search compares to other revenue models that can be applied to newspaper archives.

Update 150808: The Times will start charging for archive access "access will be charged at £4.95 for one day, £14.95 for one month and £74.95 for one year."