Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, speaks to the media ahead of the opening of the Google Germany representation in Berlin on January 22, 2019.
Carsten Koall | Getty Images News | Getty Images
LONDON – Google announced on Wednesday that it has launched its News Showcase product in the UK, which means that the tech giant will now pay for news content in the country for the first time.
The Silicon Valley company has signed an agreement with 120 British publications, including The Financial Times and Reuters, that will receive a license fee to produce snippets of news that appear on the Google News Showcase. The reports suggest that publishers will receive a few million dollars a year from Google.
The feature will be on the Google News mobile app and Google Discover, which is a feed curated by Google on mobile devices containing articles and videos.
When users click on snippets in the Google News app or Google Discover, they are taken to the full article on the publisher’s website.
“The Google News Showcase, our new product experience and news licensing program, will begin launching with local, national and independent publishers in the UK,” said Ronan Harris, vice president and managing director, Google UK and Ireland , on a blog on Wednesday.
“As part of our licensing agreements with publishers, we are also launching the ability for readers to access selected paid access content. This feature will give readers the opportunity to read more of a publisher’s content than they would have access to at the same time. allows publishers to encourage readers to become subscribers. “
Worldwide, Google convinced 450 news publications to produce content for the Google News Showcase.
The feature was also launched in Australia, Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan and Argentina. Google said discussions are ongoing in several other countries.
Long-lasting battle
Technology giants like Facebook and Google are under increasing pressure to pay media companies for their content.
Last October, 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 for the right to link to their content in news feeds or search results, Google threatened to withdraw its widely used country search engine.
The proposed law in Australia is called the news media trading code and is specifically targeted at Google and Facebook. This would force tech giants to negotiate payments with local publishers and broadcasters for content included in search results or news feeds. If they fail to reach an agreement, a government-appointed arbitrator will decide the price.
Google has been lobbying against the code, calling it “irrational” and “impractical”.
“Coupled with uncontrollable financial and operational risk if this version of the Code were to become law, it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia,” Mel Silva, managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand , told a Senate committee in Australia last month.
Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, said at a news conference that “we do not respond to threats”.