One Year In, Google News Showcase Is Still Proving Itself

Google News Showcase—the search giant’s platform for displaying and licensing news content—celebrated its first birthday this week with a public update on the growth of the program and how publishers have benefitted from it. Despite the rosy metrics—few focused on performance—publishers still have a measured outlook on the potential upside to the service, which comes at the same time as news organizations and regulators have been backing anti-trust legislation against Google in several countries. The News Showcase product allows publishers to highlight certain stories in curated panels, which appear across Google, currently on News and Discover. Google pays publishers for this content, a step toward alleviating long-standing concerns that the search giant is unfairly profiting off the traffic news websites generate without compensation. Google Reveals Sustainability Initiatives During Launch of New Products But an uneven global rollout—News Showcase is so far not available in the U.S.—and a lack of clear performance data leaves some publishers leery. 1,000 news publications, one million panels created Participating publishers, including 1,000 news publications across the U.K., Australia, Canada, Japan, Germany and India, have created over one million News Showcase panels to date, according to a 16 Nov. blog post from Google’s vp of product management for news Brad Bender. There are over 1.5 million follows on News Showcase panels, meaning readers are choosing to get regular updates from a particular publisher, per the post. Yet the new metrics do not fully explain the extent to which publishers are benefitting from this arrangement, said Jason Kint, CEO of digital content trade association Digital Content Next. “The only thing that matters is the actual revenue and the fair share of value going back to the publishers,” Kint said. Google's Bender said in an emailed statement that participating publishers have access to data that can show them the efficacy of the News Showcase. "Because the traffic goes directly to News Showcase partners, they have full access to analytics for traffic from their panels and for subscribers they’ve gained through the panels and we provide additional analytics for pre-click performance," he wrote. The only thing that matters is the actual revenue and the fair share of value going back to the publishers.Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next Publishers such as Germany's Südweste Presse and Quebec-based Le Devoir quoted in the update shared how Showcase is accelerating their digital transformation, helping them reach new audiences and strengthening relationships with existing readers. Regulatory motivations Other available data about the value of deals struck between publishers and Google for News Showcase reveal a mixed picture. News Corp said on a 4 November earnings call, deals with Google and Facebook will contribute annual revenues in the nine figures. Yet execs said a deal with Facebook has yet to be reached. A variety of marquee News Corp publications joined News Showcase, including The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, MarketWatch, The Times and Sky News. Despite the potential of hundreds of millions of revenue, some publishers say the formula Google uses in their deals is opaque and inconsistent, according to Press Gazette. In particular, the investigation found publishers in Australia, which has stricter laws requiring platforms to pay news organizations, are able to extract more from Google than those in other countries, suggesting the search giant may be more motivated by regulatory concerns than paying publishers fair market value for their content. “In Australia, the payments now coming from Google to publishers are meaningful and significantly higher than the payments that they would otherwise make in the U.K., where there is not a mandatory code in place,” director of public policy at Guardian Media Group, Matt Rogerson, told a House of Lords Select Committee on March 16. Google's Bender added in an email that "as per standard business practices, the details of contracts are confidential." A US launch is still unclear Kint says that Google’s focus on countries with a tougher regulatory environment casts aspersions on the claim that Google has launched News Showcase to “help readers find, follow and support the news organizations covering the issues that matter to them,” as it says in its recent blog post. A particular red flag is the lack of a concrete plan to launch News Showcase in the U.S., home to some of world’s biggest publishers, but which so far has no law to force Google to pay publishers, despite several legislative efforts. “If [Google] is a consumer-driven company and they care about news publishing they should have been already available in the U.S.,” Kint said. However, Google's Bender said in a statement that, the company's commitment to U.S. partners is "steadfast" and that it's "committed to playing our part to help news publishers succeed." "We’ve heard the feedback from both publishers and policy-makers that we all can do more to enable a better future for news and we have said we’d continue to develop ideas to further support the news industry," he added. Google Grants a Stay of Execution in the Death of the Cookie

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One Year In, Google News Showcase Is Still Proving Itself to Publishers

As Google touts a new program to pay publishers, news organizations weigh the potential revenue and regulatory drawbacks

Catherine Perloff

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Catherine Perloff