Google‘s smartphone-based content recommendation feed, Google Discover, has become the single largest traffic referral source for publishing giant Reach plc, its audience director (distribution and customer marketing) has said.

Martin Little told Press Gazette the rise in Discover traffic had compensated “and then some” for a decline in referrals from Google search.

Reach’s overall Google traffic has grown in the second half of this year, Little said, but there had been “a significant shift” in the contributions from different Google platforms.

What Little called “branded search” — traffic from people actively searching for Reach titles like the Daily Mirror or Cornwall Live — has remained “solid”, he said. But referrals from topic-based searches have been falling, contributing to an overall fall in the number of visitors referred via search. Visits from Google News have remained largely stable.

But Discover is “making up for that and then some on top”, he said, and “has become our biggest referrer of traffic”.

“Overall, almost 50% of our titles are on year-on-year growth now,” Little said, “and that is partly because of the shifts in Google.”

Google Discover promotes ‘soft lens’ content — but isn’t so good for news

Google Discover is embedded in the browsing experience for most users who browse Google Chrome on a smartphone.

Little said Discover “is almost like Facebook was… it’s algorithmically served, it’s based on what it thinks you’re going to like. It’s more of an escapism-type outlet”.

The increase in Google traffic at Reach has in part been driven by greater visibility into how Google Discover works. Previously, Little said, it had been “even more of a black box than Search”.

It is now much easier to monitor both your own and your competitors’ performance on Discover, according to Little. Two years ago it would not have been possible for a publisher to even split out their Discover and Search traffic, but now “you can get a far better lens on what’s working and what’s not”.

Little said 44% of Reach content gets picked up in Google Discover, but the platform is “very selective as to what it takes in and what it doesn’t… Google clearly wants Discover to be a safe environment, with brand-safe content within it”.

He described the type of content that does well on Discover as “soft-lens”: first-person pieces do well, as does lifestyle content and articles about niche interests and sports other than football.

“What is interesting as well is, for us as a commercial publisher, we don’t get a lot of news content into Discover,” Little said. “And by news, what I mean is traditional local news, or harder news.”

Reach’s news content is still holding its own in search, Little said, but there is “always a lag for content getting to Discover”. Although stories sometimes arrive on Discover within a day, “it tends to be 24 to 48 hours before content actually gets in”, which necessarily poses a problem for news content.

“You don’t get court content in there, there’s no crime getting in there, our council content doesn’t get in there as well. Stuff from our Local Democracy Reporters doesn’t really get into Discover.

“We need that content — it’s the staple of our regional brands, and it’s frustrating that we see the BBC’s version of that story get in every single time, but we never see any commercial publishers really getting that sort of content in. So it feels like Google is, on Discover, using the BBC to serve that out, but not actually being very pluralistic in its approach.”

[Read more: Publishers hooked on Google Discover traffic risk race to the bottom]

Google Discover selects ‘curiosity gap’ headlines to show readers

Little said Discover has a notable preference for “curiosity gap” headlines. For every story a Reach journalist publishes, they have to write four headlines: one for Facebook, one for Search, one for the home page and one for newsletters.

“Each of those are written in different ways,” Little said. “Search will have some keyword focus within it and the homepage one will be quite brand-safe. Newsletter [headlines] tend to have a little more of a sell… to encourage them to click through… and then social has got to be quite brand safe as well.”

You can’t feed Discover a specific headline: instead the platform chooses “the one that it wants the most”, and Little said most often Discover looks “for the most alluring headline” or “the greatest emotive element”.

Little defined a curiosity gap as “telling the story as it is but withholding the need-to-know piece of information from that headline so that people still feel the need to go and find out more”. (Advocates of the curiosity gap argue it differs from a “clickbait” headline strategy because curiosity gap articles actually deliver the information trailed in the title.)

He gave as examples the following real Reach headlines: “ITV Loose Women’s Janet Street-Porter speaks out from hospital after major surgery”, “BBC Death in Paradise star quits after five years, but fans will be happy with exit” and “NHS symptoms of silent killer, which hits one in 20 but takes years to diagnose”.

In the latter case, Little said: “It’s a very straight, factual headline, but it makes you think: ‘Well, what are those symptoms?’… And as long as you provide them on the other side, Discover rewards you quite heavily.”

Reach uses newsletters and Whatsapp Communities to build topic-based audiences out of Google Discover traffic

Little said Reach did not want the proportion of articles getting into Google Discover to get too large.

“You won’t want to be too reliant on it,” he said, emphasising that “our portfolio is more diverse, in terms of the ways that we generate traffic, than it’s ever been”.

Tech platforms make for notoriously unreliable long-term traffic sources, and Little said Reach has been trying to turn its fly-by Discover visitors into loyal readers.

“A nice example on the Daily Express would be that the Daily Express does really well with Formula One content on Discover.

“We’ve built up a newsletter audience of about 32,000 people, and a Whatsapp community of over 3,000 people, by targeting the people coming in from Discover on F1.

“The Express doesn’t get the same cut-through on Formula One on any other platform [as] it does on Discover, so we know that the generation of that newsletter audience is connected directly to people coming through…

“We’re laser-focused on thinking about: ‘how can we make sure that that traffic is something that we own over a long period of time?’

[Read more: Whatsapp for publishers: How Reach is driving millions of page views via messaging app]

Little suggested Discover has been one way Google responded to the trend of news avoidance.

“Ultimately, for us as a publisher, in some ways Google Discover is a good thing, because it causes us to really think about — if that’s where the audience interest is, that’s what they’re engaging with, how do we start to diversify our content mix to get a broader range of topics across everything we do?

“And I think that’s actually a good thing because it makes us more diverse, it makes us open to new audiences that previously we wouldn’t have been, it makes us think about content in a different way.

“But all of our principles still stand — the content needs to be high quality, it needs to be well-researched, it needs to be written really well and have good imagery.”

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Top news sites collectively received 7.5% fewer visits on the Tuesday and Wednesday of the 2024 US election than they did on those days in 2020, data from Similarweb shows.

The Associated Press, Substack and Axios were among the sites with the most growth between the two elections, while Politico, Fox News, The Guardian and The New York Times all lost substantial proportions of their traffic – according to Similarweb.

After aggregator Yahoo.com (130.6 million visits on Tuesday 5 and Wednesday 6 November) CNN was the most-visited news site in the US, drawing 109.1 million clicks. That figure is down 19.4% on the same days in the 2020 election.

The New York Times (62.4 million) was the second most-visited publisher, but its traffic too dropped 36.3%. Fox News, the third most popular publisher on the list, saw traffic drop 46.8% when compared with the 2020 election, the fifth-largest fall among the top 50 most-visited sites.

Among the ten most-visited news sites over election night, Fox was the biggest faller, followed by The New York Times and CNN. The AP (47.6 million visits, up 247.1%) was the biggest gainer, followed by NBC News (44.3 million, up 120.2%) and USA Today (27.7 million, up 70.1%). The rest of the top ten saw single-digit percentage point changes.

The significant declines at the most-visited sites may reflect broader news avoidance trends or the relative speed with which the result of the 2024 election became clear. The 2020 election, in comparison, took days to be called.

Among the broader top 50 election night news sites the fastest grower was Axios, which saw visits grow 291.7% from 1.8 million in 2020 to 7.2 million last week.

Faster growing still was publishing platform Substack (5.1 million, up 423.1%), which hosts publications by numerous journalists and was less than three years old at the time of the last election.

Web culture site The Daily Dot (2.2m, up 287.5%), Al Jazeera (3.3 million, up 204.2%) and People magazine (11.5 million, up 115.5%) also substantially outperformed their 2020 traffic totals.

The biggest fall, on the other hand, was at Politico (8.8 million visits in 2024, down 63.7% from its 2020 total of 24.3 million), followed by Yahoo News (5.4 million, down 54.8%) and Business Insider (4.2 million, down 48.8%). The Guardian (10.6 million, down 45.2%) Google News (11.3 million, down 40.2%) and Breitbart (3.9 million, down 48.5%) were all also significantly hit.

NBC News, Associated Press and climate site The Cooldown saw largest election week traffic surges

Similarweb data also shows that, among the 100 top news sites in the US, NBC News saw the largest week-on-week increase in its web traffic over the week of the election, with visits nearly tripling compared with the week before.

Climate website The Cooldown saw a comparable increase of 209.4% and the AP received 207% more traffic than the previous week.

A handful of sites saw fewer visits the week of the election than the week before, among them Cosmopolitan (down 15.1%), Variety (down 13.2%) and Vogue (down 8%).

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Fast-growing media brand Newseek has said it wants to use speed and fairness to help it stand out in the race for readers during the US election.

Newsweek SVP of audience development Josh Awtry told Press Gazette the newsbrand — the fastest-growing of the world’s top 50 English-language news sites — has to find a way to compete with news outlets “who have got infinitely more resources, fleets of data engineers… we’re up against people who have holograms”.

The magazine publisher’s plan, he said, was to “jump right to the key questions on people’s minds” beyond the individual race results and to be quicker than the competition.

He said the title had historically hired journalists with an emphasis on speed, has a roster of overnight journalists in the UK and that it has “prewrites” ready to go on covering a range of stories. (The brand has also reportedly been hiring AI-assisted live news reporters.) 

The site typically publishes more than 300 stories per day with a strong emphasis on politics and current affairs. According to Press Gazette’s rankings Newsweek is the fastest-growing top-50 English language news website in the world.

Newsweek has tried to position itself above the partisan fray: the website features a “Daily Debate” panel high up that hopes to present two sides of an issue (or, as the election approached, pitches from both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris supporters).

It also rolled out a “Fairness Meter” a year ago that allows readers to vote on whether a given article is fair or whether it leans right or left.

Awtry said the introduction of the Fairness Meter came out of a desire for the audience “to keep us honest”.

Commenting that “it’s tough to out-journalism The New York Times”, he added: “What we’re hoping to do is differentiate from a lot of the other media in being more interactive and listening a lot to our community.”

Four tenths of Newsweek’s audience “self-identifies as politically middle of the road,” Awtry said, “and if you break it apart to those who lean left and those who lean right, it’s pretty close to even…

“We don’t want to lose that ability to speak to America. If you look at our state-by-state penetration, it mirrors the population trends. Rural, urban, suburban — pick your metric, and we look like America.”

The Fairness Meter has been applied to more than 25,000 stories since the feature launched, Awtry said. It is not placed on all articles, although most harder news stories receive it. In 90% of cases where it has been used the story has been labelled “fair” by a majority of voters, he said, and of the two million votes cast in total, 70% have been for the fair option. Approximately 14% of all those votes indicated a story “tilts right” and 16% that it “tilts left”.

Users do not have to register to cast a vote on the Fairness Meter, and Awtry said the plan next year is “to keep the core functionality wide open and free for everyone, but then to use it as a registration driver for that smaller percent of readers who do want some cooler things”, for example to let users track how they have voted over time.

Newsweek.com is free to read, although it offers a paid digital subscription that removes ads and provides access to exclusive podcasts and newsletters.

“We don’t want to create any friction in the ability to register that vote,” Awtry said. “We don’t want you to have to sign up or create an account. We want that to be something that we use to take the pulse. But we’re looking for features that power users might want.”

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In March the French competition authority issued another ruling – and another hefty €250m (£213m) fine – in its long-running pursuit of Google. The judgement finds against both the search giant’s approach to publisher negotiations for the use of media content on its platforms, and the controls it’s giving news businesses over AI training.

Google’s decision to pay repeated fines instead of comply gives us reasons to think that UK publishers are soon going to be able to improve their terms with the Mountain View behemoth.

At the heart of the dispute between publishers and Google – both in France and globally – is search itself. Publishers claim that they are due payment for the use of their content on Google’s results pages. Their case is that it is only as a consequence of the imbalance in bargaining power that they’re unable to secure fair remuneration through negotiations.

Google’s counter-argument is that the traffic it delivers to publishers is more valuable than what it receives in return; that it’s unable to monetise news queries via ads, and that the freedom to link is a fundamental tenet of the internet and therefore there is no legal foundation for payments to be made.

Governments have been moved to intervene on behalf of – mostly domestically-owned (and politically influential) – news outlets. There are two means by which they have done so. How much publishers get paid hinges on which policy intervention has been deployed.

Two methods of attempting to level the playing field

The first policy option is via copyright law. This is the approach taken on the continent and the current basis for payments to French publishers.

The EU passed the Copyright Directive in 2019. This creates a new ‘ancillary’ copyright for press publishers, explicitly giving them legal basis to secure authorisation – and payment – for the use of their content by online platforms (although unhelpfully excludes the use of ‘very short extracts’, without providing a definition).

The second approach of governments is to tackle the power imbalance head-on through competition law, as we have seen in Australia and Canada. And, shortly, with the Digital Markets Unit regime here in the UK too. These interventions seek to level the playing field directly by introducing mandatory bargaining, backstopped by final offer arbitration.

So we have two different policy mechanisms seeking to facilitate publishers to get paid for the use of their content. Google’s response has been to establish a means to pay publishers which protects their core search product. Enter News Showcase.

Google News Showcase is a user-facing product. But very few people see it. It primarily exists as a neat contracting trick to facilitate payments to publishers for the use of their content whilst allowing Google to maintain the legal position that payments are not due for the use of news content in search results.

Payment disparities via Google News Showcase

Showcase is now live in 25 countries and expanding all the time. But, while Google has a single technical – and contracting – product to pay publishers, the amount paid in each country varies widely.

If payments are being made under the Copyright Directive then they’re not going to be very substantial (NB: The Showcase deals on offer in the UK at the moment broadly mirror those in the EU). Whereas, if payments are made under competition interventions and the threat of genuine negotiations for the use of content in search results, it’s a different story.

I’ll give an example. Google struck a Showcase deal with Le Monde, the venerable French national, worth a reported $1.3m (£1m) a year. To give a sense of scale and impact, Le Monde’s digital properties see around 120 million visits a month.

By contrast, in Australia Google signed a deal with Seven West Media – whose flagship news title is The West Australian, a regionally-focused daily – for AUD$21m (£15.6m) annually. The West Australian website receives around 2.5 million visits a month.

While the deals done with French publishers were under the Copyright Directive, this latest regulatory intervention is on the basis of antitrust infringements. The aim is clearly to secure deals for French publishers more like Seven West and less like Le Monde.

To achieve this the French competition authority is trying to force Google to negotiate in broadly the same way as the UK’s regime will do. That’s by mandating negotiations over search. And Google is repeatedly not playing ball. €750m (£641m) in fines over four years have now been levied.

The fact that Google is choosing to pay the fines instead of comply tells us that this is a rubicon it simply will not cross. It also tells us that this is the right regulatory mechanism to extract the most value from Google for publishers.

Given we know it would cut news entirely from its products instead of negotiate over the use of content in search, the question becomes how valuable is news to Google? And therefore, how much is it prepared to pay publishers to keep them on the platform?

Clearly, given the scale of the fines it has borne, the answer is substantially more than the amounts being paid under the EU/UK Showcase deals. So, when the new regime comes into force here in the UK, it seems highly likely that publishers will be able to force Google’s hand.

But they must do so cautiously. There is a route to a Google news blackout here – as was threatened in Australia and in Canada (and carried out in Spain) – and that’s in no-one’s interests.

The post Google’s fight in France and what it means for UK publishers appeared first on Press Gazette.

GB News had the fastest-growing news app in the UK in October, according to Press Gazette’s latest apps ranking.

Audience to the broadcaster’s app was up 57% year-on-year to 272,049,  according to data from Ipsos iris. Its growth echoes the fast growth of the GB News brand online overall in Press Gazette’s recent top 50 newsbrand rankings.

It was followed in the annual growth charts by the Daily Express (audience of 208,486, up 42% year-on-year) and The Sun (295,509, up 39%).

Samsung news app Upday (audience of 1.8 million, down 43%) and Google News (1.8 million, down 31%) saw the biggest year-on-year falls in audience.

Most popular news apps in the UK (October UK audience via Ipsos iris):

1. Apple News (13,495,986)
2. BBC News (12,602,597)
3. Sky News (2,866,748)
4. The Guardian (2,261,402)
5. Google News (1,802,316)
6. Upday for Samsung (1,797,684)
7. Money Saving Expert (1,736,362)
8. Daily Mail (1,711,358)
9. AOL – News, Mail & Video (1,183,349)
10. The Telegraph UK (869,185)

Money Saving Expert, which we included in our ranking for the first time in July in ninth place, was fastest-growing in the three months since our last update. The app saw its audience increase 69% quarter-on-quarter to climb to seventh place this month (1.7 million users).

Second for quarter-on-quarter growth was Buzzfeed (251,193 people, up 34% compared to July), while the Mirror (287,720, up 17%) was third.

The Daily Mail’s Mail+ was fourth-fastest growing (316,286 people, up 13% quarter-on-quarter). It recently revealed it has around 160,000 subscribers, 90,000 of which are digital-only (Mail print subscribers get access to Mail+ as part of their subscription).

To draw up our ranking, Press Gazette used Ipsos' list of the top 1,000 apps in the UK by audience size and selected those that, in our view, have a reasonable general or specialist journalistic offering, whether that content is original or aggregated from other sources. Sports news apps were ranked separately (see below).

BBC News closes gap on Apple News

While Apple News remains the UK’s biggest news app by audience size, second-placed BBC News narrowed the gap on the iPhone’s default news app. The Apple News app was used by 13.5 million people in October, no change on the last time we reported on this data in July, while the BBC News app grew by 2% quarter-on-quarter to reach 12.6 million people.

Both the BBC News app and Apple News apps were refreshed earlier this year. The BBC News app's refresh in July, its first significant update since 2015, led to complaints from some users although the corporation said it was necessary to "modernise its look and feel". Apple News’ updates included changes to the app navigation and the addition of a sports news tab. 

The Apple News app reached 27% of people in the UK aged over 15 while the BBC News app reached 25%.

The third most popular news app was again Sky News, used by 2.9 million people in October. Reaching 6% of UK adults, it was a significant way behind the leading two apps. Its audience was down 8% quarter-on-quarter, although its audience held steady year-on-year.

It was followed by The Guardian's app (2.3 million users) and Google News (1.8 million). Samsung app Upday (1.8 million users, rank six) fell one more place in October compared to July (it was fourth in March).

The New York Times crossword app, which allows users to play some of the newsbrand’s most popular puzzles including Wordle, Spelling Bee, and The Crossword, was a new entrant in our ranking (191,998 million users, rank 25). 

Engagement increased for many news apps

A number of news apps saw increases of over 100% year-on-year in total time spent with their content. Top was GB News (18.6 million, up 360%), followed by Mail+ (131.8 million minutes, up 356%) and Times Radio (27.6 million, up 280%).

LBC saw the biggest fall in minutes spent with its app compared to October 2022 (18.8 million minutes, down 90%). 

Topping the list for overall time spent was BBC News (1.5 billion minutes) although the public broadcaster’s app saw a sizeable fall in time spent both year-on-year (down 30%) and quarter-on-quarter (down 37%). As a result its lead over Apple News (1.3 billion minutes) on this metric was much reduced compared to July.

Three paywalled apps again led for time spent per user. Users spent 562 minutes on average across October with The Times and The Sunday Times (562 minutes) followed by The Telegraph (477 minutes) and Mail+ (417 minutes). 

UK sports news apps ranked: BBC Sport and Sky top

Among sports news apps, the BBC Sport app reached the largest audience (4.3 million users), more than twice as many as Sky Sports (1.9 million) and Sky Sports Scores (1.4 million).

Although many users utilise sports apps to stream matches and sporting events and therefore not just get the latest news, we have included all apps that, in our view, have a reasonable sports journalism offering.

Ipsos iris replaced Comscore as the industry-recognised data standard in 2021. Ipsos iris data is partly derived from a panel of 10,000 people aged 15 and over that is designed to be nationally representative. The participants have meters installed across 25,000 personal devices to measure website and app usage passively.

This data is combined with data from participating websites that are tagged so all devices visiting the site can be identified and logged.

This is the latest in a quarterly series from Press Gazette that tracks the audience and reach of the UK’s leading news apps.

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Google and other tech platforms are facing a new challenge in Spain, where Google News reopened last year following an eight-year shutdown.

Spain’s competition authority the Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (the CNMC) opened an 18-month disciplinary process against Google in March to look into whether the tech giant is abusing its position of dominance and engaging in anti-competitive practices against news publishers.

Spain is one of several countries where Google and Facebook are currently facing the threat of legislation to force them to pay for news.

Australia passed its News Media Bargaining Code in 2021 requiring Google and Facebook to pay publishers. In Canada, the Online News Act, which contains the threat of final offer arbitration if deals cannot be struck between news companies and tech firms, is currently making its way through parliament and has led to experiments in news-blocking on both Google and Facebook. The UK and US are also in the process of adopting similar legislation.

Press Gazette spoke to news industry representatives in Spain to understand what might lie ahead for tech giants in the country.

For Irene Lanzaco, director general of Spanish ​​news industry trade body la Asociación de Medios de Información (AMI), which represents many of the country’s best-known newsbrands including El Pais and El Mundo, the asymmetry between the tech giant and the publishers is clear.

“There is a lot of information on Google’s side and very little, if any, information on the side of the publishers,” she says. This means that Google is able to capture and monetise valuable audience data coming out from news and only the tech giant really knows how much news is worth to them, says Lanzaco.

Was Google News closure a ‘disaster’ for publishers in Spain?

In 2014 new Spanish legislation requiring that news aggregators pay a fee for linking to news content led Google to shut off its news platform in the country. Google News was reinstated last year after a new law was passed in 2021 allowing publishers to negotiate individually with Google.

The 2021 legislation came on the back of a 2019 EU digital copyright directive that requires online platforms to pay publishers across the bloc when displaying their material online but allows aggregators and platforms to use news “snippets” without licensing if it is a “very short extract” or “individual words”.

Spain’s new law puts it among a handful of European countries, also including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary and the Czech Republic, that have adopted the EU directive in their domestic rulebooks.

The relaunch of Google News was also accompanied by the launch of its Showcase project in Spain, through which publishers are paid for creating short newsfeeds for a dedicated section of the platform. Some 140 Spanish newsbrands from 60 publishers have signed individual agreements with Google to appear in Showcase.

According to Juan Zafra, head of Club Abierto de Editores (CLABE), a trade body that represents many of the country’s digital native newsbrands, the closure of Google News was a “disaster” that led to large traffic drops for its members. CLABE originally campaigned against the law that led Google to shut down its news platform in the country.

Lanzaco, however, says the evidence she has seen demonstrates otherwise. While traffic fell in the days after the shutdown, she says, AMI members saw much smaller drop offs than Zafra suggested. “The effect of [the shutdown] was that we improved quality metrics related to direct traffic which is the most valuable for us, of course.” A 2019 study by US media industry body News Media Alliance found similarly.

'Who gets the most out of it?' Only the platforms know

The CNMC disciplinary process in Spain follows an antitrust investigation against Google in France, which resulted in a win for the country's publishers. In 2022 a framework agreement was reached between publishers and Google requiring Google to pay French outlets for use of their content in online search results. Among European countries France has been most aggressive in ensuring that the search giant adheres to the EU’s new digital copyright rules. A year before the agreement, France fined Google €500m arguing it had flouted the directive.

Under the French agreement, Google has promised to negotiate "in good faith" with media organisations over payments and to share with publishers the information needed for news bosses to determine whether the amount is fair. According to Lanzaco this is what is lacking in Spain.

"[Publishers and Google] benefit from each other. But who gets the most out of it? Only Google and the tech platforms know because they have the data," she says.

Lanzaco hopes that the process will allow a fair assessment of what news is worth to the search giant. Google and Facebook have previously said that news has little economic value for them.

"What’s not understandable is that news is of no value to the platforms. We all know that this is not true," says Lanzaco. "They should compensate the media fairly for the use of our content."

“Tech platforms live in a perfect world where they use content that is invested in by others and that is created by the talent of others and that is the legal responsibility of others and they just take the data," she says.

Asked if Spain could consider the kind of final offer arbitration on the table in Canada should a deal not be reached, Lanzaco said that publishers in Spain would look at "possible solutions and make our minds up afterwards".

She says however that publishers in Spain are looking in the first instance to reach an agreement with the platforms. So far, only Google has opened discussions with publishers in the country.

"All of us should be realistic and sit at the table so as to be able to come to a common understanding within the framework of the antitrust authority," she says. "But really what we should do is to invest in agreement not in dispute.

In Zafra's view, technological change has brought a necessary change in the balance of power. "We come from a world in which there were very clear positions of dominance and this is over," he says.

But he hopes that the CNMC process will result in more transparency. "What we need is for the media system - publishers, digital platforms and all content producers - to be more transparent. And if this process helps provide transparency to the system, then it's welcome."

Despite Google's decision to shut down news in the country in 2014 and its temporary shutdown of news in Canada in response to its legislation, Lanzaco believes that Google does want news on its platform.

"Google is mostly a responsible company. It's aware that news is important for society and that citizens get the news from Google's products and then they go to us. But news needs to be within the ecosystem of the search engines and tech platforms because that's where the audience is."

A Google spokesperson told Press Gazette that "Google works constructively with publishers in Spain and across Europe" and provides "significant investments through our products, programs and funding". The company said that it continues "to engage constructively with the CNMC in the context of their investigation."

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Google News is relaunching in Spain almost eight years after it shut down to avoid paying publishers when the country introduced a new copyright law – amid a wider redesign of the platform to mark its 20th birthday.

The site attracts some 500m visits a month worldwide, according to Press Gazette’s ranking of the world’s top-50 English language news websites.

Why is Google News returning to Spain now?

The platform’s return to Spain comes after the country adopted a European Union copyright directive in November. That law allows online aggregators and platforms to use news “snippets” without permission from publishers if it is a “very short extract” or “individual words”.

This supersedes copyright law adopted by Spain in 2014 that allowed publishers to charge services like Google News to use their links and headlines.

The tech giant instead closed Google News in the country, saying the change was “not sustainable” because it did not advertise on news pages, meaning they made no money.

Despite fears this could have a significant impact on Spanish news publishers, the US News Media Alliance in 2019 published analysis showing overall traffic had gone largely unchanged.

Upon its return to Spain on Wednesday Google said it would be “working with publishers to reach agreements” and launch Google News Showcase, the aggregation service for which it has been signing cash-for-content deals with publishers in at least 15 countries, “as soon as possible”.

Fuencisla Clemares, Google’s VP in Iberia, said the law change had allowed “Spanish media outlets – big and small – to make their own decisions about how their content can be discovered and how they want to monetise that content”.

She added: “We hope the return of Google News to Spain helps more people find the news they’re looking for, from diverse, authoritative publishers of all sizes from Spain and beyond, and provides even more support to the journalists and publishers who work tirelessly to deliver the news.”

In a separate blog post, Google said it hoped the return to Spain “helps more people find more news, from more places, and helps publishers find new readers”.

Google News redesign

On Wednesday Google also announced a wider revamp of Google News, which turns 20 this year, that includes moving the local news section to the top of the page on desktop alongside top stories.

How Google News will look in the US after the revamp. Picture: Google

Currently, unless they specifically choose to click on local news in the left-hand tab, UK users have to scroll past sections entitled “Headlines”, “For you”, “United Kingdom” and “World” before seeing a local news widget.

Google News in the UK before the revamp

Google News fact check before its June 2022 revamp

Google has also revamped the “Fact check” section on the right-hand side of Google News on desktop to “provide more context”. It previously showed only headline links, the publication and the day of publication but will now give users the original claim alongside the fact-checked assessment from independent organisations.

Other new desktop features include the ability to customise what topics appear.

Google is often criticised for its dominance over the online ad industry alongside Facebook, reducing the size of the pie available to news publishers. However it also runs the Google News Initiative to support publishers around the world with training, funding and building innovative products.

Google News fact check after its June 2022 revamp

Also on Wednesday Google opened applications for a new Global News Equity Fund which it said was a “multi-million dollar commitment to help bring more diversity and equity to the news industry”. It is encouraging funding applications from independent journalists and small to medium-sized news organisations producing original news for minority and underrepresented audiences.

Picture: How Google News will look in Spain, via Google

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Google is appealing the €500m (£429m) fine handed down by France in July.

Sebastien Missoffe, head of Google France, said: “We disagree with a number of legal elements, and believe that the fine is disproportionate to our efforts to reach an agreement and comply with the new law.

“We continue to work hard to resolve this case and put deals in place. This includes expanding offers to 1,200 publishers, clarifying aspects of our contracts, and sharing more data as requested by the French Competition Authority.”

Original story 13 July 2021:

France has fined Google €500m for failing to negotiate “in good faith” with news publishers over payment for their content.

France’s competition regulator said the tech giant had ignored parts of its landmark ruling in April last year compelling it to negotiate over payment terms for content used in Google News and search engine results.

Isabelle de Silva, president of France’s Autorité de la Concurrence, said: “When the Authority imposes injunctions on companies, they are required to apply them scrupulously, respecting their letter and their spirit. In the present case, this was unfortunately not the case.”

She said Google’s negotiations with publishers and press agencies “cannot be regarded as having been conducted in good faith”.

[Read more: Global news industry should celebrate after Google compelled to negotiate with publishers in France]

The regulator said Google’s negotiation strategy had appeared to be “aimed at avoiding or limiting as much as possible payment of remuneration to publishers”.

It criticised Google for forcing discussions to be imposed within the framework of its Publisher Curated News partnership, which includes its Google News Showcase service.

Google announced in October it would pay $1bn to news publishers around the world over the next three years to package their content in panels under the Google News Showcase, which is live in more than a dozen countries including the UK and France.

But de Silva said that by forcing discussions through this framework Google refused “to have a specific discussion on the remuneration due for current uses of content”, as protected by neighbouring rights for publishers under French law.

She also said Google had restricted the scope of negotiations, telling AFP and French Federation of Press Agencies it would not include news agency content such as photos that have been used by publications. Google said on Tuesday it is now finalising an agreement with AFP.

[Read more: Agency photographer attempts to take back copyright in ‘game-changer’ lawsuit]

It was also found to have violated its obligations intended to ensure the neutrality of negotiations and failed to share information that would have assisted in negotiations.

Weekly news magazine L’Express said Google had “not provided us with any formulas or data to support its proposal” while daily newspaper Liberation said it had “no idea of ​​the valuation that Google has made for the use of our neighbouring rights”.

The size of the fine “takes into account the exceptional seriousness of the breaches observed and what the behaviour of Google has led to further delay the proper application of the law on neighbouring rights, which aimed to better take into account the value of content from publishers and news agencies included on the platforms,” de Silva said.

A Google spokesperson said the company was “very disappointed” with the decision.

“We have acted in good faith throughout the entire process,” they said. “The fine ignores our efforts to reach an agreement, and the reality of how news works on our platforms.

“To date, Google is the only company to have announced agreements on neighbouring rights. We are also about to finalise an agreement with AFP that includes a global licensing agreement, as well as the remuneration of their neighbouring rights for their press publications.”

Publishers in the European Newspaper Publishers’ Association and European Magazine Media Association welcomed the decision.

They said there must be at EU level through the Digital Markets Act “regulation aimed at market dominant gatekeeping platforms granting non-discriminatory access of all legal publications and offerings, as well as a prohibition of self-preferencing and undue hindering, with a regulatory binding mechanism obliging market dominant platforms to negotiate with all rightsholders of the publishers’ right fair payment for their content”.

[Read more: More regulatory curbs on Facebook and Google with European Digital Services and Market Acts]

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Top UK media bosses have described a threat from Google to leave Australia if it is forced to pay for news content as “slightly hollow” and “overplaying its hand”, urging regulators to stay “very firm and very strong”.

Google has claimed it would have “no choice” but to stop its search engine from working in Australia if plans go through for a mandatory bargaining code to force it to pay publishers and negotiate for fair fees.

Google Australia’s managing director Mel Silva said: “The ability to link freely between websites is fundamental to search. This code creates an unreasonable and unmanageable financial and operational risk to our business.”

Publishers and governments from around the world are closely watching how events play out in Australia as the UK, US and Europe all look to level the playing field between publishers and the biggest tech platforms.

[Sign up for Press Gazette’s must-read newsletters: Media Monitor (strategic insight every Thursday), PG Daily and Marketing Matters]

Speaking at a Lords communications committee hearing on the future of journalism on Tuesday, Lord Charles Colville described Google’s threat as a “shocking bit of bullying” as he asked news leaders whether Google’s threats should stop the UK from pursuing its own mandatory bargaining code.

Peter Wright, editor emeritus at Mail, Metro and i publisher DMG Media, said he believes Google and Facebook are “overplaying their hand”.

“They know regulation is coming. It’s coming here, it’s coming in Australia, it’s coming in Europe, America are going down a slightly different route but probably even more effectively using their legal system to break up these monopolies…

“I think payment for content is coming. The only argument is whether it’s going to be in the way of their commercial offerings – take it or leave it offers which are changed or made advantageous at will by the platforms – or whether there will be someone to hold the ring between the monopoly on one hand… and the news industry on the other.”

Wright, and Guardian Media Group director of public policy Matt Rogerson, both pointed out that Google agreed a deal in France aimed at facilitating publisher payments just a day before claiming it would be impossible to do so in Australia.

Rogerson said the French deal “slightly undermined” its claim that “payment for content would break the internet”.

He added: “I think the threat seems slightly hollow. Should Google pay for the use of content for commercial purposes in the same way Microsoft News does or Yahoo News does or start-up news aggregators do? I think they probably should.

“And I think the Australian code is a good step forward in trying to equalise relations between trillion-dollar platforms and what are relatively small publishers in the grand scheme of things.”

Gary Shipton, editorial director of Scotsman and Yorkshire Post publisher JPI Media, said he applauded what the Australian government was doing and said the UK industry “should be very firm and very strong. We knew that this pressure would be coming along.”

Shipton said: “All we are looking for is a level playing field and a fair payment. What we are saying is we want some transparency. We want to understand what our content, which is very expensive to source, is generating for these groups and have a fair share, a fair royalty if you like, as any other creator of content would want.

“In the end, it is fundamental to the news ecosystem because quite clearly if we cannot earn the money from these platforms to pay for the journalism in the end the journalism won’t be there. So it’s not unreasonable. We’re not asking for anything unreasonable.”

The publishers also discussed Google’s Privacy Sandbox plans to scrap third-party cookies on its Chrome browser and develop alternatives for advertising that don’t track users’ behaviour across the web.

The Guardian’s Rogerson said third-party cookies are “not inherently bad”, adding they are simply a “neutral vehicle that carries information around between two different parties. Unfortunately they’ve been tarred as compromising privacy”.

[Read more: How Google is building an internet without cookies – and why publishers are concerned]

Rogerson said he was “sure Google’s intentions with the Privacy Sandbox are good” but compared it to its accelerated mobile pages format AMP which was similarly developed in an open source way and is now under serious scrutiny in Texas “in terms of how that was designed to prevent the use of header bidding on those pages to increase Google’s market share and manipulation of the advertising market in their direction”.

Wright said the Mail had suffered some “massive” drops in Google News visibility in recent years which the company suspected was down to its use of header bidding, a programmatic advertising technique that allows buyers to bid on publishers’ websites without going through Google.

“[It was] our attempt to maintain a competitive marketplace,” he said. “Google simply makes the content unavailable.”

Google’s director of economic policy Adam Cohen said this month that  allegations the company designed AMP to hurt header bidding were false.

“Publishers are free to use both AMP and header bidding technologies together if they choose,” he wrote. “The use of header bidding doesn’t factor into publisher search rankings.”

[Read more: $1bn news fund is one small step for Google, but a giant leap for principle of paying for news]

Meanwhile Google Australia boss Silva has said the company would prefer to pay publishers through its Google News Showcase which would mean “paying for their editorial expertise and beyond-the-paywall access to their journalism, rather than for links”.

“We think News Showcase is the right solution for negotiating payments to publishers under the code,” she said. “It offers a fair, practical way forward, meets the original goals of the law, and helps secure a strong future for Australian news.”

Picture: Shutterstock

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Google will pay $1bn to news publishers around the world over the next three years and let them make more editorial decisions about how their content appears on its products.

But a collective of European publishers said the move made it clear Google is “feeling the pressure of legislation and government action designed to bring them to the negotiating table”.

The Google News Showcase will create story panels that participating publishers can package however they want with features like timelines, bullet points and related articles and, later on, video, audio and daily briefings.

It builds on the news licensing programme announced earlier this year, for which Google said it would pay for free access for users to read articles from paywalled publications to help them grow their audiences.

The tech giant said it has almost 200 national and regional publishers already on board for the product, which launched in Germany and Brazil today with German news magazine Der Spiegel and weekly newspaper Die Zeit the most prominent titles announced so far.

The initial partnerships are also being made in the UK, Australia, Argentina and Canada, where it will roll out in the next few months, although the publishers involved have not yet been revealed.

The next countries after that are expected to be India, Belgium and the Netherlands with plans to eventually take it global, meaning countries like the US will have to wait and see how it goes elsewhere first.

The story panels will appear initially within Google News on Android, then Apple and later on Google Discover and Search.

Google chief executive Sundar Pichai (pictured) said the News Showcase was “distinct from our other news products because it leans on the editorial choices individual publishers make about which stories to show readers and how to present them”.

He added that it would “give readers more context and perspective on important stories in the news and drive high-value traffic to a publisher’s site” and that it was aimed at helping the overall sustainability of news publishers around the world.

“Alongside other companies, governments and civic societies, we want to play our part by helping journalism in the 21st century not just survive, but thrive,” he said.

Press Gazette understands that although the $1bn is earmarked for the next three years, the plan is to invest more and continue the project long-term.

In January, Google owner Alphabet became the third US tech company to be worth $1tn. The company brought in $38.3bn in revenue in the second quarter of 2020 alone.

Publisher responses

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson said in response: “We applaud Google’s recognition of a premium for premium journalism and the understanding that the editorial eco-system has been dysfunctional, verging on dystopian.

“There are complex negotiations ahead but the principle and the precedent are now established.”

Der Spiegel’s head of product development Stefan Ottlitz told the FT the News Showcase showed Google was “serious about supporting quality journalism in Germany”.

However the European Publishers Council said many of its members are “quite cynical” about Google’s strategy.

Its executive director Angela Mills Wade said: “By launching their own product, [Google] can dictate terms and conditions, undermine legislation designed to create conditions for a fair negotiation, while claiming they are helping to fund news production.”

She added: “It is not yet clear how ‘News Showcase’ will work for all publishers and there are questions how it can work in tandem with publishers’ strategies to implement the EU press publisher’s right.

“It is important that publishers have the freedom to enforce their rights directly, or participate in collective agreements negotiated under European Union law.”

The publishers’ right was passed into EU law and is currently being negotiated by member states; Google is currently battling measures brought in France in the courts.

According to the EPC, the French Competition Authority ordered Google to conduct negotiations in good faith with publishers over remuneration for their content. But the tech giant argued the regulator failed to show its refusal to pay posed a serious and immediate threat to the press sector, which it said was struggling for many reasons.

A Press Gazette poll earlier this week showed support from 71% of our readers for Government intervention to force Google and Facebook to pay for news.

Picture: Reuters

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