01.10.2020
02:08
The tech company introduced the Google News Showcase in Brazil and Germany this week. In addition, he announced that in Argentina he chose Infobae as a strategic partner
October 1, 2020 Share on FacebookShare Share on TwitterTweet Share on WhatsAppShare
Brad Bender, Vice President of Product for Google News, explained how the new News Showcase platform works
24 billion users reached global news sites via Google searches in 2019. The search engine is a key tool for users to access news portals. Despite this trend, the relationship between some newspaper companies and the internet giant was conflictive in some cases.
For that reason, Google seeks to strengthen its relationship with editorial content producers. It did so first through the Google News Initiative, a plan that assisted publishing companies around the world, supporting them in their digital transformation, especially by promoting innovation projects.
Now, Google goes one step further and will start paying for quality journalistic content. The program called Google News Showcase will allow news sites like Infobae to publish daily between 3 and 21 high-quality journalistic articles with the signature of their authors to be distributed on this new platform. News companies will receive monetary compensation from Google for participating in the program.
In this way, they would attend to one of the main claims of the journalistic industry: that technology companies receive large income through editorial content, and do not distribute those profits with the content producers.
Likewise, that myth has already been demolished with the numbers that the company made public. During 2019, Google only invoiced 1.2 million dollars in advertising from searches for news topics in Argentina. And days ago he had announced that in the same period, the value generated by the advertising displayed above these news results in Brazil, known as AdWords, was $ 4 million.
Brad Bender , vice president of News Product at Google explained to Infobae that most of the news topics do not include advertising, that is why they do not generate profits either. As an example, he graphed: ” A search for a presidential election, an accident or a legal case, they do not present advertisements .”
Regarding the new platform, the executive announced that “in Brazil and Germany they will be able to access Showcase through the Google News App this week and the rest of the countries later. The goal is for users to be able to immerse themselves in the stories that matter to them. going in depth in the topics of the day ”.
The selected media will be able to publish daily between 3 and 21 articles of high journalistic quality with the signature of their authors to be distributed on this new platform.
Google’s investment in this plan is one billion dollars that will be distributed among the participating media. After the first stage, in Germany and Brazil other media from Argentina, Canada, Belgium and the United Kingdom will begin this path. It will be done to the extent that the number of participants is sufficient to be able to have a significant content inventory.
Control is of the media
One of the important points of this plan that reassured the publishing companies is that the contents will be chosen and produced entirely by the journalistic companies and Google will not intervene in the editorial considerations.
“For the media, Showcase is a way to deepen their relationship with users, grow their business and choose the stories they want to promote, the best of their journalism. For Google this is about promoting journalism, “said the Google executive in charge of news distribution.
World experience gives examples of how the relationship between media and technology has evolved. The clearest lesson is that news media companies and big tech need each other. While both can survive without the others, in those markets where the relationship broke down, that breakdown did not benefit anyone. Technology companies lost important content, the media lost traffic, and users lost access to content.
Media companies have no alternative but to distribute their content through technology giants while they need news content since users would use their services much less if they did not find news and updated information in search results.
To avoid going to extremes such as exaggerated regulations or having to suspend the indexing of news as happened in Spain, Google initiates this ambitious plan to compensate news media that publish quality content.
The transformation for some media has not been easy. Between 2004 and 2015, about 2,000 newspapers closed in the United States alone. In that same period, all the media in that country reduced their editorial staff by 45 percent. For this reason, the alliance of the publishing media with technology companies is particularly relevant.
Although in Argentina there are no regulations on the near horizon, Google has already selected the first media that will participate in its content program. In a highly complex commercial and advertising market due to the country’s global and local circumstances, Google revealed for the first time that Infobae was chosen by the company.
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