Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, speaks to the press before the opening of the Google office in Berlin on January 22, 2019 in Berlin.
Carsten Koall | Getty Images News | Getty Images
LONDON – Google announced on Wednesday that it has launched the News Showcase product in the UK, which means that the technology giant will now pay for the news content in the country for the first time.
The Silicon Valley firm has signed an agreement with 120 British publications, including The Financial Times and Reuters, which will be paid a licensing fee to produce news excerpts that appear in the Google News Showcase. Reports suggest that publishers will receive several million dollars a year from Google.
The feature will be in the Google News mobile app and Google Discover, which is a stream organized by Google on mobile devices that contain articles and videos.
When users click on excerpts from the Google News app or Google Discover, they will be directed to the full article on the publisher’s site.
“The Google News Showcase, our new product experience and licensing program for news, will begin to run with local, national and independent publishers in the UK,” said Ronan Harris, Vice President and CEO of Google UK and Ireland. in a blog on Wednesday.
“As part of our licensing agreements with publishers, we are also launching the opportunity for readers to access the selected content of the payment screen. This feature will give readers the opportunity to read more of a publisher’s content than they would otherwise have access to, while allowing publishers to encourage readers to subscribe. “
Worldwide, Google has convinced 450 news outlets to produce content for the Google News Showcase.
The function was also launched in Australia, Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan and Argentina. Google has said talks are ongoing in several other countries.
Long battle
Technology giants like Facebook and Google have come under increasing pressure to pay media companies for their content.
In October last year, Google said it would pay publishers $ 1 billion for news over the next three years.
However, when the Australian government proposed a new law that would force Google and Facebook to pay news publishers the right to connect to their content in news feeds or search results, Google threatened to remove the engine from the country. its widely used search engine.
The proposed law in Australia is called the bargaining code in the media and is specifically addressed to Google and Facebook. It would force tech giants to negotiate payments with local publishers and broadcasters for content included in search results or news feeds. If they cannot reach an agreement, an arbitrator appointed by the government will decide the price.
Google has strongly lobbied the code, calling it “unreasonable” and “unachievable.”
“Along with the difficult-to-manage financial and operational risk if this version of the Code became law, it would give us no choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,” said Mel Silva, CEO of Google Australia and New Zealand, an Australian Senate committee said last month.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told a news conference that “we are not responding to threats”.