Google News in Spain: the legacy of its shutdown and the impact of its reopening

After an eight-year absence, Google News has made a comeback in Spain, marking a significant milestone in the ongoing relationship between tech giants and news publishers.

What does this move mean for the local media market and globally? The Fix delved into the history, current dynamics, and future implications of Google News presence in Spain.

A turning point: the introduction of canon AEDE and Google News’ exit from Spain

In 2014, Spain enacted a law requiring services that post links and excerpts of news articles to pay a fee to the Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies (AEDE), the so-called “Canon AEDE”. Responding to this mandate, Google chose to withdraw Google News from the country, a move it justified by explaining that the service doesn’t generate revenue from advertising, and thus, the new approach wouldn’t be sustainable. The Spanish Culture Ministry referred to the shutdown as a “business decision”, defending the law as a reflection of the nation’s commitment to respecting intellectual property rights.

Hidden in plain sight

Before the implementation of Canon AEDE on January 1, 2015, Richard Gingras, the head of Google News at the time, declared on December 11, 2014, that Google would shutter Google News in Spain on December 16 of that year. Additionally, Spanish publishers would be removed from Google News globally.

However, observers noted that due to the distinction Canon AEDE made between news aggregators and search engines, news from Spanish publishers remained available on Google Search in two specific forms: the news box and the “news” tag. In other words, Google News continued to exist, hidden in plain sight.

The news box is a unique segment embedded within Google’s web search results. When a user’s search query is related to current news stories, these articles are compiled and displayed in a designated “news box” within the search results. The other avenue to access Spanish publishers’ news on Google, despite the shutdown, was through the “news” tab. Located directly below the search window on the Google homepage, this tab allowed users to access news after submitting a search query.

These features are part of what Google terms “Google Universal Search”, a platform that integrates various types of content, including news, into the standard web search results. This integration meant that the news articles became particles of the web search results, thereby exempting them from copyright obligations in Spain.

By employing this technological manoeuvre, Google managed to successfully navigate Canon AEDE, ensuring that Spanish news remained part of its core business. This crafty solution underscores the complexity of the relationship between technology and legal frameworks, and demonstrates Google’s agility in adapting to new regulations.

The impact of the shutdown

Google itself, in the Product Updates section of the blog written by Country Manager Google Spain and Portugal Fuencisla Clemares, stated that the company is actually beneficial to the news industry, having provided revenues for media, using tools and technologies to handle digital advertisements on its websites and apps. In Spain, they claimed, between 2018 and 2020, the company believes to have paid more than 130M dollars to the first five main news partners of its publishing network.

Despite what Google says, studies do not converge about the impact this shutdown had on Spanish publishers. Instead, almost ten years from the event, they reveal mixed results. 

Conflicting reports on the effect on Spanish publishers

While Chartbeat, an American web analytics company, recorded a 10 percent to 15 percent traffic drop with 50 large Spanish news publishers within hours after Google News was shut down, AEDE claimed that the association would not worry much, considering that Google News contributed only about 5 percent of the overall traffic for its members. 

Other analyses found that while external traffic, e.g. traffic brought by search engines, dropped sharply, internal traffic actually rose, indicating that Spanish readers who were previously directed by Google News navigated to Spanish news websites themselves once Google News was not available anymore  In this way, publishers seemed to have made up for any loss in referral traffic with organic traffic growth.

However, news aggregators are not entirely responsible for traffic driven to websites, as, a survey by the European Commission found that 47 percent of Europeans who access news through news aggregators, online social media or search engines do not click on the links and access the original articles, thereby depriving news publishers of valuable traffic. 

Moreover, there’s a difference between big and local publishers. A 2017 study revealed a 20-percent decrease in overall news consumption and a 10 percent decline in page views on publishers other than Google News during the shutdown. This decrease concentrated around small publishers, while large publishers did not see significant changes in their overall traffic.

Spain’s experience in comparison with Germany and Nordic nations

Other researchers looked at the situation in comparison with other countries, reporting that the Google shutdown in Spain had a negative impact on Spanish publishers, but it was not as negative as in Germany. These authors also pointed out that the traffic decline also reflected the overall decrease of the internet penetration between 2014 and 2015 in Spain. 

Other data show that publishers in countries without Google News – such as Denmark and Finland – are doing comparatively well, even while struggling with similar challenges to news publishers in other countries.

How the shutdown altered news consumption patterns

The shutdown also seems to have altered news consumption patterns. When Google News shut down, its users were able to replace some but not all of the types of news they previously read. Post-shutdown, they read less breaking news, hard news, and news that is not well covered by their favourite news publishers. 

Assessing the potential upsides of Google’s exit from Spain

Some scholars recognised the new law as a positive influence. Gagne (2015) pointed out that the passing of Canon AEDE was the first time a law increased the incentive of Spanish publishers for innovation in their competition with each other for more traffic. On this line, the News Media Alliance also claimed that the closure was not detrimental to the Spanish news publishing industry as a whole, or better, that it’s not a matter of good or bad consequences. The reduction in traffic was low and temporary, with unique monthly visitors increasing for many publishers. For example, El País reported an increase from 8.5 million unique monthly visitors in October 2014 to 16.6 million in December 2015.

All of these studies seem to concur that the relationship between Google and newspapers can be characterised as both hostile and collaborative, reflecting a “frenemy” dynamic. On one hand, news aggregators can be helpful in facilitating news discovery and selection; on the other hand, traffic monitoring might be more effectively measured with an emphasis on quality, rather than quantity.

The bigger picture

Clara Soteras, Director of SEO and Product at the Spanish publisher El Nacional, reminds us of the context in which this situation is playing out: that of the upward trend called “news avoidance”. More and more users are deliberately avoiding the consumption of information through the Internet. This may be a consequence of the pandemic, but currently, the media are exploring ways to continue monetising and attracting users to their websites by offering entertainment and other products beyond mere information. Large groups are also betting on not only the subscription wall but also growing the product through holding events and acquiring new thematic websites. Soteras states: “The future of publishers is uncertain, and we are going to depend on what the technological giants decide, above all. We are talking about Google, which contributes the vast majority of traffic to the publishers (through search or Discover). The traffic provided by social networks has been diluted because platforms such as TikTok, for example, do not facilitate user circulation to the web; instead, they help create a community that maintains engagement with the medium”.

In this context, the challenges and uncertainties faced by media in the current landscape are the fact they are, first of all, dependent on tech giants. Publishers are, in any way, heavily reliant on platforms like Google for traffic, and the future is closely tied to decisions made by these tech companies. Secondly, in the context of the journalism crisis, new monetisation strategies are being explored – subscription walls, events, and acquisitions – to attract users and generate revenue.

Changes in legislation and Google News’ return

In 2022 Google’s parent company Alphabet announced Google News’ comeback in Spain following legislative changes in the country. The turnaround came with the understanding that, although the new government rules still include a snippet tax, it allows publishers the option to waive the right to restrict links. As a result, Google News is no longer required to negotiate with each individual publisher it links to in Spain, paving the way for its return. Spanish media now have the autonomy to determine how their content can be indexed and identified, and how they wish to monetise it. The company also believes that a robust future for journalism necessitates collaboration among tech companies, media, and governments, pointing to initiatives such as the Google News Initiative, aimed at helping media transform their business models and foster growth. 

International context

In a separate development, Google has recently reached an agreement with the French government to negotiate with French publishers regarding payments for linking to their content. In France, Google was fined 500 million euros after failing to comply with an order to conclude a fair agreement with publishers for using their news content on its platform.

In Canada, too, the market domination of digital giants like Facebook and Google, and the migration of advertising dollars to online platforms have thrown the business model for all publishers and broadcasters into a tailspin, and two of the most profound negative impacts have been the decline of local news for the Canadian public, and the widespread loss of media jobs through layoffs and attrition, due to downsizing, consolidation, and outlet closures.

The goal of the lawmakers to force large tech companies to pay news publishers for the articles taken and displayed in their apps led to the approval, in June 2023, of the Online News Act bill, which contains the so-called “link tax”.

Following the recent passage, Kent Walker, president of global affairs at Google, wrote on the company’s official blog that the law, also known as Bill C-18, jeopardises the entire business of the company.

While the Online News Act and the Online Streaming Act are critical pieces of legislation, Randy Kitt, Director of Media for Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union, told The Fix there is no single magic solution that will fix the local news crisis in Canada. 

At the moment, it seems the entire industry is waiting to see how events unfold in Canada. Google, for example, has been paying publishers for some time now through the Google News Showcase service, where publishers select news they want to show (shown through panels in Google News and Google Discover). Even so, Soteras reminds us it seems that it is not enough because there are many more technology partners like Meta that need to be regulated. “The consequences should be positive for the media, since the work of journalists is valued, but precisely the Internet was born with the definition of being open access, of democratising information, and this can be really difficult for citizens to understand”. In addition, it is something that should be regulated at a global level and this is probably the most difficult thing to achieve, since each state or regulatory body has its own perspective. “Personally”, says Soteras, “I believe that either a global defence and a common position of all the media are achieved before the big companies or it will be a very difficult issue to regulate”. 

The consequences can be negative both for the media and for companies if a law such as the one in Canada is applied (which may mean the withdrawal at the end of the year or at the beginning of 2024) of all links that give access to media websites from platforms such as Google, if there are no changes in the planned legislation. It must be taken into account that this is a business for both parties: the media monetise their content through the generated page views that have ads from these platforms. In addition, there is also the collection of data from readers through Google Analytics, which helps the platforms to better understand the user’s profile in order to subsequently impact more advertising on them.

All in all, the debate has been open for a long time. Soteras questions: “What government or agency will be the first to dare to deal with media pressure when they start to lose much of their revenue? You must first change the business model of publishers. Applying this change without first having secured new funding sources can only lead to the closure of some publishers and, above all, the most local ones. At the same time, you have to work to explain to users that content has a value and a price, but the beauty of the Internet is precisely this, that it is open and that you can access all the information on the web. In addition, if part of the information is closed, it would be the most truthful and worked on by publishers, and fake news could remain accessible and open”.

The upshot

The reopening of Google News in Spain is a complex and multifaceted issue that reflects broader debates about copyright, compensation, and the role of aggregators in the media market and suggests a nuanced understanding of the impact, consequences, and future of local publishers in Spain.

The return of Google News, coupled with the new EU copyright directive, represents a significant shift in the media landscape. As publishers navigate the challenges of monetising content and engaging with tech giants, the balance between valuing journalistic work and maintaining the open nature of the Internet will continue to shape the future of the media industry in Spain and beyond. The ongoing developments in other countries and potential global regulations will be key areas to watch as this complex relationship continues to evolve.

Source of the cover photo: https://depositphotos.com/home.html

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