Google News, whose news?

Fooling around with search words?

What’s the harm in trying? After all, everybody loves some vertical mobility on Google search hierarchy. That said, this headline is pure plainspeak; an important question, rather.

On what?

Here’s some background: Just this week, a report by the News Media Alliance, or NMA, a trade body that represents over 2,000 American and Canadian newspapers, revealed that search giant Google made an eye-popping (for us in the news business and not necessarily for those in the Googleverse) $4.7 billion in advertising from news content in 2018. Mind you, media research agencies estimate that 16-40 per cent of Google search results are news content.

Wow!

Well, hold your horses. To put this in perspective, according to NMA, this figure almost equals the entire revenue of the global online news industry. And, the interesting trivia here is Google did not produce the content. All it did was to provide a platform for users to find links that can take them to the content. And to put this even sharper and maybe in a funnier perspective, the whopping $4.7 billion comes from performing a pointer-service.

Interesting! But who’s really the king, the content or the search platform?

Before we get there, let’s raise a suitably moral and economic question: How come the search company was able to rake in billions while, globally, the newspaper industry is preparing its own obit in many geographies. Take Google’s home turf, the US. According to journalism.org , which is backed by the Pew Research Centre, weekday print circulation in the country now stands below 35 million (print and digital circulation), from a high of some 60 million in 1994. The same is the case with advertising revenues: from $65 billion in 2000 to less than $19 billion in 2016. Between 1994 and 2014, newspaper jobs plunged 40 per cent.

Oh dear, looks like you need a hug!

And more! Still facts are sacred. Now, the question NMA poses is whether Google or similar platforms that host (or direct searches to) content produced by an industry that is fighting for survival, should share a slice of their revenues with the content producers? Instead, Google is flexing its monopoly over the digital universe and demanding what many pundits term unbridled servitude to platform capitalism, as Canadian writer Nick Srnicek puts it in his book on how monopolistic platforms such as Google and Facebook control certain activities (say dissemination of news) and benefit from the network effects generated by large user bases.

That’s indeed revealing. Still why should they share revenues? Content makers can always opt out of Google.

Not easy. The internet giants with their unprecedented scale and size now holds the potential to make or break content businesses. In the US alone, more than 90 per cent people access news online using Google as a source. So, it is natural for publishers to demand their share of the pie. In fact, NMA says Google does not allow media companies access the user data their news content help generate on its platform. This is also a valuable commodity which Google has been monetising.

Sounds credible. But what’s Google’s take on this?

It says these estimations are wrong and that the NMA study ignores the value Google provides. It says every month Google News and Google Search drives over 10 billion clicks to publishers’ websites, which drive subscriptions and ad revenues. It says it has worked “very hard to be a collaborative and supportive technology and advertising partner to news publishers worldwide”.

Well, that’s a tad rhetorical.

You said it. Considering the way technology-enabled processes such as Search Engine Optimisation (popularly known as SEO) have changed (impacted rather) the way news is produced and disseminated digitally, influencing even the very semantics and syntax of print news across the globe, especially in vulnerable geographies, it’s anybody’s guess who’s benefiting from these transformations. Now, on revenue-sharing, as they say, watch this space.

A weekly column that helps you ask the right questions

COMMENT NOW