Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, speaks to the media ahead of the opening of Google Germany’s Berlin 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, meaning that the technology giant will now pay for news content in the country for the first time.
The Silicon Valley firm has signed a deal with 120 British publications, including The Financial Times and Reuters, who will receive a license fee to produce news clips that appear in Google News Showcase. Reports suggest that publishers will receive a few million dollars a year from Google.
The feature can be found in the Google News mobile app and in Google Discover, a feed created by Google on mobile devices with articles and videos.
When users click on the snippets in the Google News app or Google Discover, they go to the full article on the publisher’s site.
“Google News Showcase, our new product experience and news licensing program, will be rolled out to local, national and independent publishers in the UK,” said Ronan Harris, vice president and managing director at Google UK and Ireland, in a blog post on Wednesday.
“As part of our licensing agreements with publishers, we are also introducing the ability for readers to access certain paywall content. This feature allows readers to read more of a publisher’s content than they would otherwise have access to, while publishers to encourage readers to become subscribers. “
Globally, Google has convinced 450 news publications to produce content for Google News Showcase.
The feature has also launched in Australia, Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan and Argentina. Google said talks are underway in several other countries.
Long-term struggle
Tech giants such as Facebook and Google are under increasing pressure to pay media companies for their content.
Last October, Google said it will 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 pull its widely used search engine out of the country.
The proposed law in Australia is called the news media negotiation code, and it specifically targets 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 can’t close a deal, a government-appointed arbitrator will set the price.
Google lobbied hard against the code, calling it “unreasonable” and “unworkable”.
“Coupled with the unmanageable financial and operational risk if this version of the Code were to become law, we would have no choice but to no longer make Google Search available in Australia,” said Mel Silva, director of Google Australia and New- Zeeland, a Senate committee in Australia said last month.
Scott Morrison, the Australian Prime Minister, told a press conference that “we do not respond to threats”.