One of our subscribers was kind enough to forward me a link to the recent Observer article in the Guardian by James Robinson which provides a high-level sketch of Reed Elsevier's plans to receive revenues from Google on link referrals to their premium scientific/technical/medical content sites, with other search engines potentially to follow. It's nice to see that Reed is exploring the path of The New Agggregation model that we've outlined, especially in that it's proposed that Google pay Reed for referrals. This is an interesting riff on the syndication model that Yahoo! and other portals use to pay for premium content appearing in their on-site services such as Yahoo!Finance: syndication without the pipe, if you will, allowing users of search engines to get syndication on-the-spot. How this monetization scheme works out in the long run for both Reed and Google remains to be seen, but it is a promising opportunity for ad-driven search engines to provide the front-end monetization for contextualizing serious professional content effectively in venues that readers go to first for answers.