Like most industries, news media outlets have made business decisions impacting revenue and the business landscape. Not all of those decisions have paid off.  One such decision was made almost twenty years ago to allow news content to be used on search and social platforms when the value exchange was fair, and traffic produced revenue through advertising. However, today, that value exchange is nearly nonexistent. It has been reported that 65 percent of users stay within the walled gardens and do not click through. And when few do click through, the ad tech tax is imposed, where the platforms take up to 70 percent of every digital advertising dollar because they also dominate the ad tech ecosystem, which feeds off the data collected inside their products and across the web. There is no longer a fair exchange of value, and no one publisher alone can alter this dynamic.

The White Paper outlines several ways in which Google uses news content to its advantage – and to news publishers’ detriment – across its products and services:

• The use of news content through AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), Google Discover, Google News app, Google Assistant, and Search have become a “walled garden” in which publishers and consumers are increasingly forced or encouraged to stay.
• Evidence that AMP, in which users read articles served by Google, benefits the platform to the detriment of news publishers who lose advertising revenue, reader data, and subscribers in comparison to organic search.
• Terms of Use are exclusionary and anticompetitive whereby consenting to the use of content for one product irrevocably binds the publisher to other products and services, some that directly compete with news publishers’ offerings.
• New evidence presented to the courts of anticompetitive practices around “header bidding” – an auctioning tool that competes against Google, producing a higher payout for publishers – was discouraged by Google as an intentional move to improve its financial gain in advertising auctions.
• Revelations that Facebook substantially curtailed its use of header bidding in return for Google giving Facebook a leg up in publishers’ web display and developers in app ad auctions, allocating a portion of the wins to Facebook and helping Facebook’s ad network, FAN, beat the competition.

As the Senate markup of the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (JCPA) approaches (the Senate text was released in late August and it was listed to the Senate Judiciary Committee agenda for markup on September 8), critics of the bill have referred to it as a way to “prop up an industry that has largely failed to address its business problems” unrelated to the platforms. The White Paper proves this is not the case. If the platforms were required to come to the table and negotiate with news publishers for fair compensation for use of their content, as the JCPA specifies, it would address at least one critical piece of the gross marketplace imbalance with the dominant platforms.

Danielle Coffey, Executive Vice President and General Counsel at the News/Media Alliance said, “Google extracts revenue from valuable news content by deliberately and systematically delivering personalized information to users to keep them within their walled gardens. This fuels their engine of scraping reader data to sell their information and target them with ads.” Coffey continued, “There remains little bargaining power and, as a result, news publishers are forced to consent to nearly unlimited uses of their content in exchange for scraps to cover the tremendous investments it takes to produce quality journalism. If this continues, the production of quality local news content will be irreparably harmed.”

In the White Paper, the Alliance recommends passage of the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act, which would allow news publishers to collectively negotiate for fair compensation from the tech platforms.

The White Paper can be found here.

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Media Contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org

The post Statement: White Paper Shows Google’s Ongoing Use and Abuse of News Content, Why We Need the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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Updated September 5, 2022

The News Media Alliance has produced a White Paper, “How Google Abuses Its Position as a Market Dominant Platform to Strong-Arm News Publishers and Hurt Journalism.”

Download updated White Paper (September 2022) here.

About the White Paper

The White Paper is based on more than a year of interviews and consultations with many Alliance members about their experiences with Google products. It outlines several of the ways in which Google uses news content to its advantage across its products and services. The use of news content through AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), Google Discover, and the Google News app, as well as Search becoming more of a “walled garden” in which publishers and consumers are increasingly forced or encouraged to stay, has been systematically making use of news content to enhance Google’s bottom line. In exchange, because there is little bargaining power, news publishers are not receiving fair value for quality content.

Based on the conclusions reached in the White Paper, recommendations from the Alliance include:

• Antitrust scrutiny through the current investigations by the DOJ and state Attorneys General and remedies that address the abuses and impacts on news publishers.
• Passage of the safe harbor bill, also known as the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act, to allow news publishers to collectively negotiate for better business arrangements with the tech platforms.
• Compensation mechanisms that properly account for the value that platforms receive through original news content provided by established news organizations.

The Alliance has submitted the White Paper to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for its investigation of Google’s anticompetitive behavior.

Resources

Click the links below to download the White Paper and related resources.

White Paper with Graphics:

This visually-friendly version of the White Paper includes seven new graphics created to help explain some of the concepts in the report.

White Paper with Graphics (PDF, June 2020)

Graphics:

Download and share the individual graphics from the White Paper. Corresponding text for each graphic from the White Paper is below.

For use on social media, please credit the News Media Alliance. Click on an image, then right-click and select “Save image as” to download.

PowerPoint Presentation:

Download our presentation (PDF) of the White Paper graphics for your use and sharing.

Download in PPT format (Note: Some fonts may not display properly)

Graphic 1: How Google Dominates the Online Marketplace 

From page 4 of the White Paper: AMP keeps users in Google’s ecosystem while creating several disadvantages for many news publishers – including making it more difficult in some cases to form direct relationships with their readers, reducing some publishers’ subscription conversion rates, limiting the use of interactive features in AMP articles, reducing some publishers’ ad revenues, and impairing their collection of certain user data.

Graphic 2: How Google Comes Between Newspapers and Users

From page 14 of the White Paper: At the most fundamental level, Google has placed itself in the middle of the relationship between the newspaper and its user. The user is no longer visiting the publisher’s website directly, but instead viewing a copy of the article hosted on Google’s servers. Further, Google controls the AMP elements of the format, its functions and capabilities, and encourages users to stay within the search results page, for example, by creating an H-scroll in the Top News carousels that seamlessly moves from one publisher to the next without ever leaving Google. As subscriptions become increasingly important in an era in which digital ad revenues pale in comparison to earlier revenues from print ads, having a separate proprietary format that does not easily foster direct relationships is even more problematic.

Graphic 3: AMP URL API Terms

From page 19 of the White Paper (text on page 18): In our view, the AMP URL API terms of use also amount to exclusionary and anticompetitive conduct. A news publication does not appear to have the ability to acquiesce in the use of its AMP content on Google mobile search, for example, while declining permission for use in the new (and free) Google News app, which may directly compete with a newspaper’s own app or another app licensed by the publisher. Further, the language is sufficiently broad and unclear as to raise the question whether it gives Google the right to use the content for free for other purposes, such as artificial intelligence, that supposedly “improve” the APIs (and may in turn reinforce Google’s market power). Moreover, the terms give Google the right to sub-license use of the content to third parties, including presumably for a license fee. Finally, the license is irrevocable; although a news entity can theoretically stop creating AMP pages for its publication and stop using Google’s AMP URL API (with all its negative consequences), Google’s right to use the content continues indefinitely for all earlier-posted AMP pages.

Graphic 4: The Price of Appearing on Google News

From page 24 of the White Paper: News publishers are required to grant Google vast and unclear rights to use the publishers’ news content. The required grant of rights to Google extends not only to Google News but for all “Google Services” – defined as any products, services or technology developed by Google from time to time. In short, as a price of having their content appear on the regular Google News website, a publisher apparently is not only required to participate in the Google News app, and any future version of the Google News app, but any product or service developed by Google in the future.

Graphic 5: Google: A Walled Garden

From page 29 of the White Paper: For many years, Google Search results consisted of simple blue links with only a headline and very short snippet from an article. Today, Google Search makes heavy use of premier news content, including high quality news photos. Google uses this content to enhance its own brand – especially in an era plagued by fake news – and earns substantial advertising revenues for aggregating content it did not create or fund.

Graphic 6: The Effect of Google’s Walled Garden

From page 30 of the White Paper: One growing concern for the news industry is the current length of snippets from their articles, which often can collectively provide ample information on any news story to satisfy the casual reader skimming the news. Google is able to use its role as the market dominant platform to pressure newspapers into providing “rich snippets” for search. If these rich snippets are not on properly optimized pages (meaning the publisher implemented Google dictated structured data and markup properly, and the images are of requisite quality and size), the newspaper is put at competitive disadvantage. As illustrated by the examples and screenshots detailed below, a second, broader concern is the format and wide range of content presented by Google on today’s search results pages, usually above the traditional headlines and links to news articles – changes which undoubtedly decrease the chances that a user will click on a news link. Many have quoted the stunning statistic that, “In June of 2019, for the first time, a majority of all browser-based searches on Google.com resulted in zero clicks. We’ve passed a milestone in Google’s evolution from search engine to walled-garden.”³⁸ The situation is even more stark on mobile: in the past three years, “[o]rganic has fallen by almost 20%, while paid has nearly tripled and zero-click searches are up significantly. … Today … almost two-thirds [of mobile searches ended without a click.]”³⁹

Graphic 7: Google Assistant Does Not Give Credit to Original Publisher

From page 36 of the White Paper: Google Assistant is but one of the growing “Voice-first” Google platforms.  The Google website states that, “If you search with the Google Assistant, featured snippets may also be read aloud.”⁴² The full extent of this practice is not known, but in a limited review the news publishers have certainly found examples. When Google Assistant provides an audio response, that audio response obviously does not contain any link to the original article.  In short, in that setting, the quid pro quo that supports any fair use defense is absent.

Additional Resources:

Plain White Paper (no graphics) (PDF, September 2022)

Alliance Letter to the Department of Justice (June 18, 2020)

Statement: White Paper Shows Google’s Ongoing Use and Abuse of News Content, Why We Need the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act (September 6, 2022)

Press Release: Alliance Releases New White Paper Outlining Google’s Dominant Market Behavior, Harming of Journalism (June 18, 2020)

For more information:

Please contact Alliance Executive Vice President and General Counsel Danielle Coffey if you have any questions.

The post White Paper: How Google Abuses Its Position as a Market Dominant Platform to Strong-Arm News Publishers and Hurt Journalism appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

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Submitted to Department of Justice to Inform Investigation of Google’s Anticompetitive Behavior

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Arlington, VA – Today, the News Media Alliance released a White Paper, “How Google Abuses Its Position as a Market Dominant Platform to Strong-Arm News Publishers and Hurt Journalism.” The Alliance has submitted the White Paper to the Department of Justice (DOJ) as they proceed with an investigation of Google’s anticompetitive behavior.

The White Paper, which is based on more than a year of interviews and consultations with many Alliance members about their experiences with Google products, outlines several of the ways in which Google uses news content to its advantage across its products and services. The use of news content through AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), Google Discover, and the Google News app, as well as Search becoming more of a “walled garden” in which publishers and consumers are increasingly forced or encouraged to stay, has been systematically making use of news content to enhance Google’s bottom line. In exchange, because there is little bargaining power, news publishers are not receiving fair value for quality content.

“The leading copyright cases concerning search engines and aggregators are over a decade old and the precedent they created no longer reflects the realities of the modern online ecosystem,” stated Alliance Senior Vice President and General Counsel Danielle Coffey. “Despite the fact that the digital marketplace has changed and many of Google’s uses of news content may not be fair use under the current circumstances, there remains little bargaining power with Google and, as a result, news publishers must consent to these practically unlimited uses by Google without compensation, regardless of the strength of our copyright protections.”

Based on the conclusions reached in the White Paper, recommendations from the Alliance include:

• Antitrust scrutiny through the current investigations by the DOJ and state Attorneys General and remedies that address the abuses and impacts on news publishers.
• Passage of the safe harbor bill, also known as the Journalism Competition & Preservation Act, to allow news publishers to collectively negotiate for better business arrangements with the tech platforms.
• Compensation mechanisms that properly account for the value that platforms receive through original news content provided by established news organizations.

The White Paper can be found on the Alliance website here.

###

Media Contact:
Lindsey Loving
Director, Communications
lindsey@newsmediaalliance.org
571.366.1009

The News Media Alliance is a nonprofit organization representing more than 2,000 news organizations and their multiplatform businesses in the United States and globally. Alliance members include print, digital and mobile publishers of original news content. Headquartered near Washington, D.C., in Arlington, Va., the association focuses on ensuring the future of news media through communication, research, advocacy and innovation. Information about the News Media Alliance (formerly NAA) can be found at www.newsmediaalliance.org.

The post Alliance Releases New White Paper Outlining Google’s Dominant Market Behavior, Harming of Journalism appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Earlier this year, the European Union adopted its new Copyright Directive that modernizes and harmonizes copyright laws across the EU. Article 15 of this Directive creates a “Publishers’ Right” that grants publishers in the EU an independent right to protect their content against unauthorized uses by online platforms. It was a major step toward recognizing the value of high-quality journalism and helping to ensure that news publishers are compensated for the use of their content by services such as news aggregators (which currently use – and benefit financially from using – news publishers’ original content without compensating the publisher).

However, in response to France’s recent implementation of the law, the first country to implement it, Google has indicated that it will remove all snippets (unless publishers agree to waive their right to compensation) from search results in France, arguing that doing so would allow it to avoid licensing content under the Copyright Directive.

This is not the first such law to be passed in Europe. Similar laws previously passed in Germany and Spain. While Germany’s law was found to be invalid due to procedural issues, Spain’s law – passed in 2014 – requires news aggregators such as Google to pay for a license to use news content. As a result, Google decided to shut down its Google News service in Spain at the end of 2014.

For years, critics have attempted to make the case for why the EU should not adopt a similar law, arguing that the Spanish law and resulting Google News closure were disastrous for Spanish news publishers, with some publishers experiencing double-digit drops in web traffic.

And for years, we’ve heard otherwise from our European colleagues.

To better understand the impact of the closure of Google News in Spain, we recently spoke with our European colleagues and reviewed publicly available website data. What we found was that much of the data contradict the narrative pushed by Google and other opponents of the Publishers’ Right. The data we reviewed do not indicate that publishers would be significantly harmed if Google ceased to operate Google News in a particular country.

Here is what we found:

In addition to talking with our colleagues at Spanish and European news industry organizations, we looked at other studies, as well as publicly available unique visitor data and other statistics from eight Spanish news publisher websites since 2014. The data we reviewed indicates that the closure of Google News in Spain in 2014, and the underlying Spanish law, were not detrimental to the Spanish news publishing industry as a whole. In fact, they indicate that those Spanish news publishers included in the analysis were minimally affected and that the reduction in traffic following the closing of Google News was, if anything, low and temporary.

Since the Google News Shutdown in Spain, Overall Traffic to News Sites Went Largely Unchanged

Over the long-term, data showing online website traffic trends for Spanish news sites from 2014 up to 2019 seem to have remained largely unchanged, with the total number of unique monthly visitors actually increasing with many publishers. For example, El País, one of the biggest newspapers in Spain, reported 8.5 million unique monthly visitors in October 2014 before the Google News shutdown, whereas in December 2015, that number had increased to 16.6 million.

In addition to the decrease in total traffic appearing to be relatively small, anecdotes from those close to the Spanish news publishing industry indicate that the publishers made up for any loss in referral traffic from Google with organic traffic growth.

Cutting Out the Middle-Man Benefits News Publishers Because Direct Traffic Is More Valuable Than Referral Traffic

A 2017 study looking at the effects of news aggregators on news consumption (based on Spanish data) also shows that Google News acts as a substitute to publisher landing pages, the traffic to which is generally assumed to be more valuable to publishers than click-throughs to individual articles. So, the closure of Google News may therefore actually increase more valuable traffic to news publisher sites.

Other data show that publishers in countries without Google News – such as Denmark and Finland – are doing comparatively well, even while struggling with similar challenges to news publishers in other countries.

Finally, the aggregators’ use of news content without compensation may hurt consumers as it does not help sustain, in the long-term, the kind of high-quality journalism they rely on. A survey by the European Commission found that 47 percent of Europeans who access news through news aggregators, online social media or search engines do not click on the links and access the original articles, thereby depriving news publishers of valuable traffic. Research we reviewed has also found that readers often do not see Google News as a major driver for their news consumption habit, therefore reducing the effect of its hypothetical closure in any given country.

While data on the impact of the Spanish law is limited, our findings suggest that the picture is not as clear-cut as critics say it is. The news publishing industry in Spain was not devastated by the adoption of the ancillary copyright law, and countries without Google News still support relatively healthy news industries.

You can find the full analysis of our findings, containing more statistics, examples and study findings here.

The post Google News Shutdown in Spain Was Not as Bad as Google Would Have You Believe appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Click on the graphic below to view it in full-size. If you have more questions about how to engage with a platform or how to treat audiences driven from certain sources, please contact rebecca@newsmediaalliance.org.

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