In order to find, report and distribute news online to readers, digital news companies in India need to spend a considerable amount of money. The online content creation and news business involves a lot of human resources along with investing in technology platforms. And there is no denying that online advertisements are the bread and butter for any media firm as the main product—i.e. news or content—is mostly offered for free.
Now, you might be thinking that this is a fairly simple business model where the news is delivered online for free, readers click on it to read them and hopefully they will interact with the ads on the web page as well. In return, based on the popularity of the news website, advertisers pay media firms to gain the visibility of their advertisements. A decade ago online news operated this way or at least the way it was expected to work.
But how can we ignore the world’s largest online advertising company- Google when it comes to ads. Sure, it’s also one of the biggest tech companies, but its bread and butter is advertising, just like news companies.
If you think about it, all the bright minds Google employed to create new technologies mainly focus on people’s attention or ‘screen time’ to eventually get them to see more ads. To add to this, these days it’s much more than just commercials, it’s about trying to guess what’s going on in your mind and also predicting and eliminating uncertainties.
Google News doesn’t cost anything like Uber has no cabs
Google may have foreseen our reality decades ago when it created Google Search. Members of Google’s funding team believed that a time would come when people would search everything on the Internet on Google Search. Be it movies, sports, porn, food, home, everything including news. And with smartphones, Google literally owns the internet, at least for the general public.
Google entered the news business simply by offering to help digital news companies deliver news online effectively. It’s as if people searched for their favorite recipes online in the early 2000s, they’d have to search for news at some point in the future as well. And thus began Google News: without hiring a reporter or desk person or buying a camera. All he had to do was figure out an algorithm through which it could control which news or news websites presented users on the first page of search or on Google’s ‘top news’ carousel.
And the battle for online traffic started. Every online media company wanted to ‘rank’ their news in the holy top spot of Google News and Google Search for every possible keyword. The rules were set: if a story doesn’t rank on Google and doesn’t generate numbers it can be considered ‘useless’, no matter the efforts of the reporter or the investments of the news company.
Whether it was the ‘Top 5 best smartphones to buy’ or ‘A politician murdered’, all stories suddenly began to be measured by a single metric: the ‘Google number’.
Soon, Google also began selling analytics to help media companies accurately measure online traffic. A new job role was created: SEO for News. The key to winning the online news race turned to employing better and bigger SEO teams.
Now, with Google entering the news business, stakeholders from media companies have already predicted what has been written above in the past. But what they haven’t understood in the past is that Google will move so fast as to essentially try to be the ‘God Father’ of the online news business.
how so? Well, Google is now deciding how much advertising money online media companies get. In fact, the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) – an association of the digital arms of leading media companies in India – claims that “website publishers receive only 51% of ad spend by advertisers.”
“Google is the major stakeholder in the digital advertising space, and it unilaterally decides the amount to be paid to publishers for the content they create as well as the terms on which the above amount is to be paid. Example Informer (DNPA) alleged that Google has unilaterally decided not to pay news publishers for snippets used by them in search,” the news body told the Competition Commission of India (CCI). Said in his complaint.
Isn’t it the same as Uber? A big taxi company which has no taxi but decides the fate of every taxi driver.
‘Google is controlling us’ to ‘Google will help you online’
With both advertising money and online traffic in Google’s control, it is now clear how Google is helping itself rather than simply delivering news effectively. The DNPA has now gone to the CCI to explain how Google is abusing its monopoly in the online search engine space.
Fair trade regulator CCI has also announced an investigation against Google for alleged abuse of its dominant position. According to the Competition Commission of India (CCI) order, “In view of the foregoing analysis, the Commission is prima facie held that Google has contravened the provisions of section 4 of the Act.”
The DNPA has registered a case under Section 19(1)(a) of the Competition Act, 2002 (the ‘Act’) against Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, Google India Pvt Ltd and Google Ireland Ltd., alleging violation of Section 4 of the Act. has done. ,
“Most of the traffic to news websites comes from online search engines (over 50%), with Google claiming to be the most dominant search engine. Based on that, Informer has averaged that over 50% of the total traffic to news websites is routed through Google and, being the major player in this field, Google determines through its algorithms that Which news website is discovered through search. It also states that it is content produced by news media companies that creates context for the audience to interface with the advertiser; However, online search engines (Google) enjoy much higher revenue/returns than publishers,” the news body said.
“Google not only has a monopoly position in search in India, but it also has a very strong position in ad arbitrage and controls/retains a major stake at each level,” it alleged.
Google AMP, zero-click search and no-pay for snippets
The DNPA claimed that zero-click searches increased from 50% in June 2019 to 65% between January and December 2020.
“Zero-click searches are interpreted to mean that user queries are resolved on the results page itself, without the user visiting the targeted website. As such, by displaying its own ads, Google is asked to extract value from zero-click searches, while publishers lose out on traffic,” it explained.
Talking about AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages, the news body said that “Google gives publishers no choice but to implement the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) standard or lose important placements in mobile search, resulting in reduced traffic.” Goes.”
“For this, publishers were forced to create mirror-image websites using this format, with Google caching all articles in AMP format and serving the content directly to mobile users. It further states that, for AMP articles, Google restricts paywall options until publishers rebuild their paywall options and their meters for AMP. The only alternative to the AMP system is for publishers to subscribe to Google, which benefits Google to the detriment of publishers,” it added.
It is claimed that Google arbitrarily pays a small part of the revenue generated from advertisements on websites/links, without disclosing any basis for computing such revenue. Not only that, Google does not pay for snippets of news content created by media companies that are displayed by Google in search engine result pages.
Technically, any content that Google displays on its News tab or search pages is not owned by it.
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