Google ran an experiment to understand the value of European news content. The data shows people visited Google only slightly less often when this content was removed, and Google’s ad revenue did not significantly change.
Google ran an experiment to understand the value of European news content. The data shows people visited Google only slightly less often when this content was removed, and Google’s ad revenue did not significantly change.
The problem is that society has transitioned to a point where most people essentially go to Google and Facebook for all their information. Given the monopolistic power of such platforms on public opinion, there is a very strong societal interest to ensure that actual news, not merely the propaganda of the highest bidder, is what people have access to.
The responsibility of Google to pay for it can be argued, but as real reporting will always cost more to produce than AI slop pushed by propagandists, there is arguably a public interest in that as well. The alternative is legitimate news more often than not ending up with more ads and paywalls than propaganda, which will just result in more people reading sources based on less reliable reporting.
I don’t know. I go to news portals or aggregates or feeds for news. Do people actually just type “news” into Google? I suppose for specific events, but I could actually see it being true that news searches weren’t making up much of the activity. The way it’s going to be is subscription based or publicly funded for anything worthwhile