Newspapers voice fears over Google advertising 

Google recently began to host trial advertisements on the US version of its popular news aggregator Google News. 

Expressing fears that the move will "definitely affect newspapers' advertising revenues in the online word," the European Newspaper Publishers Association (ENPA), which represents over 5,200 newspapers, yesterday encouraged members to "consider all legal and other means to ensure that Google understands the harm it is causing to readers [and] journalists". 

But Google repeated previous promises that it would not extend its advertising plans beyond American shores. "We have no plans to show adverts against Google News search results outside the US at this time," Google's senior manager for communications Bill Echikson told EurActiv. 

Service 'drives advertising revenues' 

Google has long insisted that its news service in fact benefits participating newspapers by increasing traffic to their websites. "By enabling people to discover information, Google drives web traffic, customer queries, advertising revenues and sales to our partners, both online and offline," the company argues on its blog. 

"If people want to read the story, they must click through links in our results to the original website," Google explains. "If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we take the paper's stories out." 

After conducting a search query, Google News users in Europe see only headlines, short abstracts and image thumbnails from the relevant articles. But American readers receive text adverts alongside the content in a similar style to those seen by European Gmail users. 

Monetising the news 

Some analysts believe traditional news media should be pleased with Google's decision to sell advertising. "Instead of getting all bent out of shape, the news media should be praying that Google succeeds and finds a way to monetise the news," wrote commentator Ken Chan on US journalist John Battelle's blog. 

"Then, the rest of the news media can jump aboard the Google bandwagon, 'cause they haven't found a way to make money online by themselves," Chan added. 

However, ENPA insists that individual publishers should also be allowed "to fix the price or compensation" for inclusion on news aggregators as a matter of principle. 

"To ensure that newspaper titles remain sustainable and competitive, publishers rely on revenues from content sales, copyright licensing and advertising, not only from print versions, but increasingly from their online newspapers," it said in a statement. 

Indeed, concerns over lost revenue even drove giant news agencies Agence France Presse (AFP) and the Associated Press (AP) to sue Google for "illegally" reproducing their material, while Belgian publishers' association Copiepresse went further by requesting Google not to include its news (see EurActiv LinksDossier on 'Copyright protection of online content'). 

Online advertising is a sensitive issue at EU level, with Google recently finding itself under fire from the European Commission over its use of targeted or behavioural ads (EurActiv 01/04/09). 

"To run their own businesses, news aggregators such as Google rely and depend on content produced by others, originating in most cases from newspapers. Without content provided by our industry, services such as Google News would not be viable and would probably not even exist," read a European Newspaper Publishers' Association (ENPA) statement. 

Regarding Google's decision to sell advertising on its news service, ENPA said the move showed that the company was not following public statements made to publishers "that it would not place advertisements on its news service".

"It also sends a very negative signal that there is no intention by Google to negotiate in an open and fair basis with newspaper publishers," the association added. 

Furthermore, "publishers have developed and support ACAP , a permission-based solution allowing any content provider to express what can or cannot be done with their online content," the ENPA statement continued.

Indeed, ACAP  (Automated Content Access Protocol), a non-proprietary, global permissions tool putting content owners in control of their online content, is supported by the European Commission. 

A statement on ACAP's website says it is "destined to become the universal permissions protocol on the Internet, an open, non-proprietary standard through which content owners can communicate permissions for access and use to online intermediaries".

"The management of content and rights in the digital age has become one of the key challenges facing all content creators. Our content is our product/our value, and if the way it is managed and exploited is determined more by third parties than by ourselves, then we are simply putting a lot of trust and a lot of risk in their hands," said ACAP Chairman and World Association of Newspapers President Gavin O'Reilly.

"Being ACAP-enabled says to the world 'I claim my intellectual property right over this content'," O'Reilly added. 

"Today, newspapers allow us to search and index their information. It's easy for their computers to block us with a robot file, but they've made the decision that it's OK for us to point to their content, because we send traffic to their sites. In a sense, we're in this together," the Philadelphia Daily News reported Google CEO Eric Schmidt as saying. 

"As to the 'Where's the money?' question, that's much harder. We have not yet, in my view, developed a good substitute for the totality of revenue that newspapers have. But Google will certainly not become a paid service," Schmidt continued.