This unfair arrangement needs to end.
$4,700,000,000.
It’s more than the combined ticket sales of the last two “Avengers” movies. It’s more than what virtually any professional sports team is worth. And it’s the amount that Google made from the work of news publishers in 2018 via search and Google News, according to a study to be released on Monday by the News Media Alliance.
The journalists who create that content deserve a cut of that $4.7 billion, said David Chavern, the president and chief executive of the alliance, which represents more than 2,000 newspapers across the country, including The New York Times.
“They make money off this arrangement,” Mr. Chavern said, “and there needs to be a better outcome for news publishers.”
Google, of course, wants to protect this lucrative profit machine, so it has disputed the figures.
But whatever the figures are, the essential point here is that Google is a digital gatekeeper which is using its position to profit at the expense of publishers. Google makes and distributes Google Chrome, it develops Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, which it bundles its apps with, it operates the news and web search engines that people use to access information, including news. And of course it makes a lot of money selling advertising.
“If you look at the reason they have such high engagement on their platforms, increasingly news is the No. 1 driver,” media executive Terrance C.Z. Egger told the New York Times. “Given that, they wouldn’t want to see news go away. And yet the unintended consequence is we need to share the revenue or get paid for the content that we produce.”
Yep. Journalism, like other things worth having, isn’t free. Someone has to produce it. If society ceases valuing journalism, there will be less journalism.