Google He has assured that the news is not profitable for his advertising business after conducting an experiment in eight European countries. The company wanted to understand the value provided by the News content in Europe After having detected, he says, several inaccurate reports that significantly overestimate said value.
Technology has shared the results of the test, which has consisted of the news elimination In search results for two and a half months for 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, thanks, Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Spain. The experiment has been held between November 14, 2024 and January 31, 2025.
Google argues that users go to their platform even when there is no news content
With the test, Google wanted to answer two essential questions. On the one hand, If users would continue to go to Google If the news content was not available; And on the other, how would the consequent loss of users affect, if any, to their advertising income. “We already have the results: the European news content in search does not have a measurable impact on Google’s advertising income ”the company has commented on a post of its official blog.
Specifically, according to the published document, the data showed that the search admission did not change despite a 0.8% decrease in the daily average of users, which, as the company interprets, suggests that Users continue to use Google for commercial consultations, even when they use it less for news consultations. The company also indicates that general impact on advertising income, discover, display ads and other Google properties could not be distinguished statistically from zero, neither in general nor by country.
“From finding a florist to consulting the weather forecast or reserving a flight, people use Google for many different reasons”; Explains the company in its publication.“This study showed that they still turn to Google for these other tasks, even when Google is less useful for the news”
Google has carried out its experiment according to the European Copyright Directive (European Copyright Directive, EUCD), approved in 2019, and that requires news aggregators to pay the media and publications for fragments of content that go beyond “very short individual words or extracts.”
To comply with the regulations, over the last years Google has implemented the program Extended News Previews (ENP)through which he has established collaborations and agreements with more than 4,400 publications in 24 countries of the European Union. The objective of this is to address the content visualization of the news editors that goes beyond brief links and extracts.
Google says that in recent years regulators and editors of the European Union and other parts of the world have requested in writing reports on reports The effect of search news content on the use that consumers make of the company’s products and in the economic value of this content for Google.
The company’s intention would have been to show that the media and publications They have overestimated the value of journalism For your advertising business, and use the results of the experiment in your negotiations with the industry.
However, Google is under scrutiny in Europe in regards to the copyright of the media. In France, for example, it was fined last year with 250 million euros, and in Germany has made changes in its products after the study of the authorities.
Neither of the two countries have been part of the experiment carried out.
