No chance we gonna pay: Google snubs Australia government demand to pay news publishers
04 June, 2020
Google has rejected demands it pay vast sums of dollars annually in compensation to Australian press under a government-imposed earnings sharing deal.
The company’s top executive in Australia said Google made barely Aus$10 million (US$6.7 million) per year from news-linked advertising, a fraction of a government watchdog’s estimates for the sector.
In an effort being closely watched all over the world, Australia is set to unveil plans to force major internet companies to share advertising earnings they earn from news featured in their services.
The country’s competition regulator, the ACCC, has estimated that Google and Facebook together earn some Aus$6 billion (US$4 billion) per year from advertising in Australia.
Leading news publishers have demanded the two companies pay at least ten percent of that money each year to local news organisations, that they say have lost the vast majority of their advertising earnings to the global technology giants.
Mel Silva, Google’s managing director for Australia, dismissed such figures as wildly unrealistic.
“We all concur that high-quality news has great social value, but we must understand the economics as well,” Silva said in a blog page post Sunday.
She said Google last year earned just Aus$10 million in earnings from clicks on advertisings located next to news-related search queries.
“The majority of our earnings comes not from news queries, but from queries with commercial intent, as when someone looks for ‘running shoes’ and then clicks on an ad,” she said.
Silva also denied ACCC arguments that the tech businesses gain significant “indirect benefits” from displaying news because the content draws users with their platforms.
News “represents only a little number of queries” on Google, accounting this past year for barely one percent of actions on Google Search in Australia, she said.
Job cuts
The Google executive said her company alternatively provided Australia’s press with “substantial” value by sending persons to their websites.
“To place it plainly, a lot of men and women (Australians and beyond) click from Google to Australian news websites, gives publishers the opportunity to generate income by showing them advertisements or turning them into paying subscribers,” she said.
She said Google search accounted for 3.44 billion visits to large and small Australian news publishers in 2018, valuing those referrals at more than Aus$200 million annually for the news companies.
Google’s position bodes ill for negotiations that your ACCC hopes to pursue between Google, Facebook and Australian media companies over a mandatory “code of conduct” governing issues such as for example revenue sharing, curbing disinformation and protecting user privacy.
The regulator suggested last month that Australian publishers might need to organise a “collective boycott” of Google and Facebook if voluntary negotiations on the code of conduct fail.
Silva said Google was ready to take part in the procedure, but added that “it’s vital that you base decisions on facts, not inaccurate numbers and unfounded assertions”.
The ACCC has before end of July to draw up the final code, that your government has said it'll quickly implement.
Google and Facebook experienced a huge effect on media companies across the globe as they capture the lion’s share of online advertising spending.
In response to falling revenues, exacerbated by the monetary impact of the coronavirus pandemic, Australian outlets have permanently or temporarily closed more than 150 newsrooms, slashing a lot more than 20 percent of jobs in the sector since 2014.
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