The
world’s most popular and much sought-after search engine, Google, has said it
will start paying some publishers for their news content. It will pave the way
for reduced tensions between the internet search giant and the beleaguered news
industry. Google is a multinational, publicly-traded organization.
“The company has planned to launch a
licensing program to pay publishers for ‘high-quality content’, this year”, the
company said. Entire program will start with local and national publications in
Germany, Australia and Brazil, with more to come soon”.
In
his blog post, the Vice President of product management, Brad Bender said,
“This program will help participating publishers monetize their content through
an enhanced storytelling experience”. Bender described it as a significant step
forward in how the company would support high-quality journalism. All the
program's articles will be available on Google's News and Discover services.
The Company will also pay for users to read pay walled articles. The tech giant
has been fighting the news industry's demands for compensation for years, in a
battle that has taken on more urgency as the coronavirus pandemic caused
advertising revenue at publishers to collapse.
France's competition regulator had in
April 2020, ordered Google to pay publishers for using snippets of their
content while Australia unveiled plans to make the company pay fair
compensation for journalistic content siphoned from news media.
Germany's Der Spiegel, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit, Tagesspiegel and Rheinische Post, Australia's
Schwartz Media, The Conversation, Private Media and Solstice Media and Brazil's
Diarios Associados and A Gazeta are among the first news companies that struck
deals with Google recently.