WASHINGTON – Google made a whopping USD 4.7 billion from the work of journalists last year via search and Google News, taking a huge cut from the online ad revenue of media houses which lost a crucial source of income, resulting in many getting shrunk or closed, a media report said.
News is a significant part of Google’s business, according to a study to be released on Monday by News Media Alliance (NMA), which represents more than 2,000 newspapers across the US.
The journalists who create that content deserve a cut of that USD 4.7 billion, president and chief executive of NMA David Chavern was quoted as saying by The New York Times. The California-based Internet giant made the amount from the work of news publishers in 2018 via search and Google News, it said.
That USD 4.7 billion is nearly as much as the USD 5.1 billion brought in by the United States news industry as a whole from digital advertising last year, the report said.
The NMA cautioned that its estimate for Google’s income was conservative. For one thing, it does not count the value of the personal data the company collects on consumers every time they click on an article like this one. “They make money off this arrangement and there needs to be a better outcome for news publishers,” Chavern said. 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. — PTI
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