Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, speaks to the media ahead of the opening of the Berlin representation of Google Germany 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 technology giant will now pay for news content in the country for the first time.
The firm Silicon Valley has signed an agreement with 120 UK publications, including The Financial Times and Reuters, which will pay a license fee to produce news clips that appear in Google News Showcase. According to reports, 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 compiled by Google on mobile devices containing articles and videos.
When users click on the snippets in the Google News app or Google Discover, they are taken to the full article on the publisher’s website.
“Google News Showcase, our new product experience and licensing program for news, will launch with local, national and independent publishers in the UK,” Ronan Harris, Vice President and CEO of Google UK and Ireland, said in a blog post on Wednesday . .
“As part of our licensing agreements with publishers, we also enable readers to access select payroll content. This feature allows readers to read more of a publisher’s content than they would otherwise have access to. “while enabling publishers to encourage readers to subscribe.”
Worldwide, Google has convinced 450 news publications to produce content for Google News Showcase.
The feature has also been introduced in Australia, Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan and Argentina. According to Google, discussions are underway in several other countries.
Prolonged struggle
Technical giants like Facebook and Google have come under increasing pressure to pay media companies for their content.
Last October, Google said it would pay $ 1 billion for news over the next three years.
When the Australian government proposed a new law that would force Google and Facebook to pay news publishers for the right to link to news tools or search results to their content, Google threatened to take its widely used search engine out of the country.
The proposed law in Australia is called the naming code for news media and is specifically targeted at Google and Facebook. This would force technology giants to negotiate payments with local publishers and broadcasters for content included in search results or news feeds. If they can not reach an agreement, an arbitrator appointed by the government will determine the price.
Google worked hard against the code, calling it “unreasonable” and “unworkable”.
“Together with the unmanageable 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,” said Mel Silva, managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, a Senate committee in Australia said last month.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison told a news conference “we are not responding to threats”.