Google Signed To Pay Publishers From UK And Argentina For Their News Content

After Google paid Australia’s news publishers, it’s planning to pay news publishers based in the UK as well.  

Popular news publishers like The Financial Times, Reuters, and other 118 British publications have signed a deal with Google.  Through the Google News Showcase platform, the web search giant has to pay web content providers as they drive traffic to its services.  The amount can also be considered as license fees to show the news in the Google search engine.

In the next three years, Google plans to pay $1 billion to the publishers through the Google News Showcase platform. Google has already signed the deal with 450 news publishers around the globe spreading from North America,South America,Europe, Australia, and Asia and more countries are under discussion as per the CEO of Google – Sundar Pichai.

Ronan Harris- vice president and managing director at Google UK and Ireland says, “Google News Showcase, our new product experience and licensing program for news, will begin rolling out with local, national, and independent publishers in the UK” in his latest blog post, posted on Wednesday.  It is also the first time Google will pay for news in Britain.

Harris adds – “As part of our licensing agreements with publishers, we’re also launching the ability for readers to access select paywall content,”. “This feature will give readers the opportunity to read more of a publisher’s content than they would otherwise have access to while enabling publishers to encourage readers to become a subscriber.”

As the Google News Showcase was launched in Australia and the UK, similarly Google also launched its news showcase platform in Argentina on Feb 10 via its blog post. Google has signed a deal with 40 news publication to its news showcase  program, that includes some big Argentinan media like Clarin, La Nación, Perfil, Infobae, Crónica, Cronista, El Economista, Diario Río Negro, El Día, La Gaceta and El Litora. 

Hector Aranda, CEO of Clarin– one of the  largest media organizations in the country expresses his satisfaction with Google’s movement of signing a deal with Argentinian publishers. He quotes – “We are satisfied to continue building a mature and productive relationship with Google in Argentina”. 

Google and the journalism industry have been working together for 10 years, and both the tech giant and Argentina are getting benefited from it. Last year, Google helped to fund 233 small and medium local newspapers across the country through their Journalism Emergency Relief Fund.

Although Google will pay the news publishers for showcasing their content in its new showcase platform, the publishers are allowed to check which stories they want to present to showcase and how they want to present. In short, Google will give complete freedom to the news publishers for creating and presenting their content and also grant users limited access to material behind publishers’ paywalls.

While Google supports news publishers by paying them, it also faces numerous antitrust claims in the US for using data of its users for digital advertising and search products. A claim also states that Google and Facebook unfairly controlled the market for digital ads.

According to eMarketer- a data tracker, it is estimated that both companies combined will dominate half of the entire revenue generated from digital ads. While Facebook is expected to make $40.76 billion, Google is expected to make $50.2 billion of the total US Market in 2021. Because of such great revenue, Australia also had proposed a law where Google had to pay for news articles to show it in their search index.