I've written recently on some of the internal debate going on inside the news(paper) industry around Google and other news aggregators (good for context):

Japanese Newspaper Publisher Says No To Google News

Aggregated News Search Surpasses Branded News in 2004

But that's not my argument here. What is? The real secret behind how Google makes money on Google News.

It's called AdSense; I'm sure you've heard of it.

But isn't that completely to the contrary of what Mr. Penenberg wrote? Yes, and that's the point.

Penenberg wrote that Google probably can't run advertising on its site without risking lawsuits from news publishers, and that may or may not be true.

But Google cleverly gets around this by signing up publishers (of all shapes and sizes) to run AdSense.

So guess what? You, the user, go to Google News. You click on a headline and end up at a newspaper, broadcast or blog site that, gasp, runs AdSense. You click an ad: Google gets its piece, and the publisher gets his.

What's more, Google gets branding on the publisher's site (many of whom also feature Google search), which if clicked, generally recycles traffic back to Google.

Pretty clever those Google guys.