Here comes Google News Showcase, a support to quality journalism
It is called Google News Showcase and it is a new kind of news experience, which will benefit both publishers and readers: word of Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, that presented the new product anticipated in recent months with the announcement of a breakthrough in the relationship between Google and publishers, paid for the publication of quality content in the ecosystem of the search engine.
What is Google News Showcase
From the company’s official blog pages, Pichai says to be “proud to announce that Google is developing long-term support with an initial investment of 1 billion dollars in partnership with news publishers”.
It is the biggest financial commitment to date for the company, which “will pay publishers to create and edit high quality content for a different type of online news experience”.
This is how Google News Showcase was born, described as a “new product that will benefit both publishers and readers” because “proposes the editorial care of excellent and recognized editors to provide readers with more information on the stories that matter and, in the process, helps the different voices of publishers to emerge and develop deeper relations with their audience”.
How works the new Google News product
Google News Showcase consists of story panels that offer “participating publishers the ability to package stories that appear in Google news products, providing a deeper narrative and more context through features such as timelines, bullet lists and related articles”which will be followed by other resources “such as video, audio and daily briefing”.
Readers who click on the preview of the stories will be automatically redirected to the websites of the newspapers, where they can read the news in full, and will have “more context and perspectives on important stories in the news”while publishers benefit from a “high value traffic to the site”.
This approach is “different from that of our other news products, because it is based on the editorial choices that individual publishers make about which stories to show readers and how to present them,” explains Pichai, who then offers more details.
News Showcase is based on the licensing program for news departed in late June, “which is already paying publishers for quality journalism”, and other news-related initiatives such as Subscribe with Google, Web Stories and audio news. In the initial phase, the product is only available on Google News on Android, but will soon be launched on Google News on iOS and in the future will come on Google Discover and Search.
Benefits for the editors
From what we learn from the first pieces of information, the press agencies will be partly paid according to the number of articles they edit and produce for Google News, but the number of views will not affect the remuneration (of which the total annual amount has not been disclosed).
As we were saying, publishers will have a wide control over these new story panels, which in fact derive from the “full coverage” existing on Google News; the novelty lies in the ability for publishers to choose which news to show and how to do it, never had before.
Google has already stated that there are no ranking implications with Showcase and therefore story panels will not be a ranking factor. Apparently there are no direct advertising implications and all monetization takes place on the publisher’s website, which can benefit from a potential increase in engagement and CTR and, consequently, revenue; also represents a significant new brand awareness opportunity for publishers, which could indirectly lead to higher revenue from ads and subscriptions.
Moreover, as part of the licensing agreements, Google will display some content only in subscription, to which users otherwise would not have access, which could then bring new readers and potentially additional subscribers.
Google News Showcase’s debut
The product has been distributed to readers in Brazil and Germany since October 1, 2020 and in the coming months will expand to other countries where local facilities support these partnerships.
At the moment, says the CEO of Google, “we have signed partnerships for News Showcase with nearly 200 leading newspapers in Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, including award-winning national publications such as Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, Folha de S.Paulo, Band and Infobae, together with regional and local newspapers such as El Litoral, GZH, WAZ and SooToday”.
The number of newspapers will continue to grow in the process of expanding News Showcase to other countries, including India, Belgium and the Netherlands, and implementation in other areas depends on negotiations with publishers, rather than on the technology itself.
Google’s investments on the information field
Both News Showcase and Google’s financial investment, which will extend beyond the three years initially planned, “focus on contributing to the overall sustainability of our journalistic partners around the world”, continues Pichai, which then focuses on the attention that the company has on the information field.
The business model of newspapers, based on advertising and subscription revenue, has evolved for over a century as audiences have turned to other news sources, including radio, television and, Subsequently, the proliferation of cable television and satellite radio, recalls the manager. The Internet was therefore the last change and certainly will not be the last and Google, “along with other companies, governments and civil societies, wants to do its part by helping journalism in the 21st century not only to survive, but to thrive”.
Benefits for Google
Although there is no reason to question Google’s commitment to helping the news industry, this is still an enlightened personal interest case, as Greg Sterling writes on Search Engine Land, who lists all the benefits and goals that the American company achieves with Showcase and the corresponding financial support.
- Improving Google’s relationships with publishers, which have often been the most critical rumors against the giant.
- Mitigate some of the regulatory, tax and antitrust issues related to the news and convince regulators and politicians that Google is not the news destroyer in their countries, but a key part of the solution.
- Ensure that Google News has unique, high-quality news content and features as a differentiator in the Apple-and-Facebook competition.
Google and journalism, a complex relationship
In the same hours, also on the official blog, appeared a second article dedicated to the delicate issue of the relationship between Google and journalism, signed by Matt Brittin (President Google Europe, Middle East and Africa), who speaks – not without a vein of controversy, in a veiled response to various accusations to the American company as in the case of French Google News or the European link tax – Google’s investments in the news sector and the benefits brought to the entire industry.
According to Brittin, every day “millions of people in Europe use Google to find information”; Big G is aware of the crucial value of quality journalism “in today’s uncertain and rapidly evolving world” and has the goal of providing in Research “the most relevant and authoritative information available”. For this reason, he shares “a common cause with news publishers: supporting quality journalism to help create a more informed world”.
In concrete terms, then, the group provides “already significant investments through our products, programs and funding, including sending readers to European news sites eight billion times per month”.
Frequently asked question on Google and news
The manager enters into the merits of Google’s commitment in the news sector by proposing a series of answers to frequently asked questions, that serve to clarify – at least from the point of the company – the transparency towards publishers and the benefits that the latter can derive from the presence on the products of the ecosystem of Mountain View.
How does Google use the news content?
As well as linking to every other page of the Web, Google links to news articles with a URL and sometimes a short preview as snippet, if the publisher so wishes. Whenever you “search on Google, we provide links to thousands, sometimes millions, of web pages with useful information: when you search for news, those pages could come from a large traditional news publisher or a new digital newspaper; could come from a local news site or a small publisher specializing in health, fitness, food or fashion”.
Whatever the circumstance, Google’s task “is to get in touch with the most relevant information and publishers have always been able to check if and how they want the links to appear on Google”.
How does Google supports the news?
The way people consume news is changing and even the business models that support and support news are changing: for this reason, says Brittin, “we have worked hard to deepen our support for the industry in many ways over many years.”in particular to achieve the following goals.
- Helping publishers reach a wide audience
Google Search and Google News “help news publishers by sending large amounts of traffic to their sites for free”. In Europe alone, Brittin reveals, “people click on the contents of news linked by Google more than eight billion times a month: this means that we direct 3.000 clicks per second to publishers’ websites”. According to a study by Deloitte, for the largest news publishers every click has a value of 4-6 euro cents, mostly generated through advertising and subscriptions.
- Providing significant advertising revenue
Every year Google helps “publishers earn billions of euros in advertising revenue” because, in addition to the publishers’ advertising sales efforts, “our technology brings more advertisers and money to publishers’ pages and apps”.
On average, news publishers “retain over 95% of the revenue generated by digital advertising when they use Ad Manager to display ads on their websites”.
The money “paid to publishing partners in our global advertising network was 10 billion dollars in 2015 and grew to $14 billion in 2018, working closely with technology, publishers and advertisers”.
- Simplifying subscription sells
Publishers are building new business models around their digital content, and Google has created subscription tools that help them increase new revenue from online visits, such as Subscribe with Google, which offers publishers “an easy way to increase digital subscriptions” (the user displays a preview of the content and, to complete the reading, is invited to subscribe).
- Helping publishers through technical expertise, tools and investments in innovation
The tools “we build are in collaboration with publishers,” says Brittin, who first cites the AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages: “five years ago it took an average of 19 seconds to load a page on a mobile browser, so we partnered with publishers to create a new format to greatly improve the mobile Web and ensure readers can view their content”.
In 2015, he recalls, “we launched the Digital News Initiative, a 150 million euro initiative to further support high-quality journalism by financing innovative projects with publishers”. These projects, continued “working closely with major publishers, have produced brilliant concepts that help to address the challenges of the sector from the fight against misinformation and local story telling, to increase digital revenues and to explore new technologies”. This initiative was followed by the $300 million Google News Initiative, which promotes work in Europe and around the world.
- Extra help during the pandemic
During the pandemic, when sales of physical newspapers were reduced due to the blockage and advertising was suddenly slowed, Google has “provided nearly 10 million euros in emergency fundings to over 1700 small and medium-sized European publishers affected by COVID-19, as well as financial support for news publishers with an exemption from the ad publication rate on Google Ad Manager”.
How much Google earns with news queries?
Much more edgy are the next questions, starting with this focused on Google’s revenue from the publication of current affairs queries and news content.
According to Brittin, “the direct economic value that Google gets from news content in the search is very small” because “advertisers generally do not try to post ads on news content in the Search, because a search for current news usually does not provide a clear signal of what someone might be interested in buying”.
In addition, he remind us, “we do not post ads on Google News or in the news results tab on Search” and the investment in news is not “for profit, but because it is important for society, for publishers and for citizens who want to read quality journalism”.
Most of Google’s revenue “does not come from news searches, but from a small percentage of the total searches performed by people who use the engine to make a purchase, for example by typing running shoes and then clicking on an ad”.
Why does Google not pay for the news?
According to Brittin, “it’s not true to say that we don’t pay for news nor generate value for the industry”: Google’s links to news help “direct millions of readers to publishers’ websites and apps, instead of producing news articles ourselves”, and this “creates a huge opportunity for publishers to turn those readers into loyal subscribers or show ads”.
How does Google comply with the European Copyright Directive?
While waiting for all Member States to adopt the new European legislation, Google is “collaborating with regulators and publishers to comply” in countries where the law has already been adopted, such as France.
Can Google do more?
Google News Showcase is one of Google’s first concrete actions to “support the future of journalism, also within the framework of what we heard during the debate on Article 15 of the European Copyright Directive”: only in the first three years, “We will pay more than $1 billion to publishers who create and maintain high-quality content for this product, with the intention of extending it as part of our long-term commitment to supporting the information industry”.
Google acknowledges “the strong desire of regulators to help the information industry overcome the long-standing crisis it is facing, which is why we are engaging with policy makers on this issue and providing new ways to help publishers profit from their content”.
Quality journalism is more important than ever, says Brittin, and for this reason “Google helps people find news, finances journalism and supports the wide range of news publishers with products and technology as they adapt to the digital world”.
