This took a huge cut from the online ad revenue of media houses which lost a crucial source of income, resulting in many of them getting shrunk or closed, a report said yesterday.
The California-based internet giant made the cash from the work of news publishers last year via search and Google News, it said. “They make money off this arrangement and there needs to be a better outcome for news publishers,” Chavern said.“The study blatantly illustrates what we all know so clearly and so painfully,” said Terrance C Z Egger, the chief executive of Philadelphia Inquirer PBC, which publishes The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News and philly.com.
Some 40 per cent of the clicks on Google’s trending queries are for news. That’s content that Google does not pay for, the report said, although it often presents headlines from news outlets verbatim. The two of them ferry more than 80 per cent of external traffic to various sites. That is a far cry from the analog days, when media barons controlled how their publications reached the public and collected all the ad income they generated.