Google is starting to fall back on the threat to leave the Australian market. In a blog post today, the company expanded an olive branch, focusing on Australian publishers joining the News Showcase program, which pays publishers as part of a licensing program to refer traffic to their stories.
If you miss the context, Google has previously threatened to pull Search out of the Australian market in response to new legislation requiring reference sources such as Google and Facebook to pay organizations to link to their content. Apparently intended to combat a perceived “imbalance” in the relationship between news platforms and referral sources such as Search, the law gives publishers the opportunity to double, and not only earn it from advertising revenue driven by referral traffic, but from the mere fact of being linked by Google in Search or other products. Of course, publishers were all very happy about it, and Google was for obvious reasons.
It remains to be seen how things will work out for other businesses, but Google has opted to enter into private agreements with ‘a growing number of Australian publishers’ – including The Canberra Times, The Illawarra Mercury, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, The New Daily, InDaily and The Conversation – to appear in the Google News Showcase. According to the blog post, this Showcase contains a licensing program for content in Google services (presumably which includes Search), and it may therefore address the issue of the new law functionally, although more publishers will have to participate.
In addition to licensing, Google will also pass publisher analytics to better target readers and understand the flow of topics and trends over time.
This is not the first time Google has paid for news. Last year, a licensing program was launched that should at least partially mean legal change in the EU, and some Australian publishers were already on board by then. With the program, Google can even pay for articles about the readers to promote their content. Google also has a “subscribe with Google” program in which many major publications participate, including The Washington Post and Financial Times.
This agreement does not mean that Google has yet to pay for every Australian publication, and that it may not fully resolve the issue or comply with the law, but it does mean that the company is willing to discuss licensing arrangements further before aggressively pursuing them. enforcement, including forced arbitration, and many outlets are already on board. Microsoft’s disappointment must be palpable.