- BY STEPHANIE MLOT
- DECEMBER 11, 2014
Rather than pay to include content from Spanish publishers on Google News, Google will close up shop there instead.
Google News is shutting its doors in Spain to avoid a new set of fees being imposed in the country.
Starting in January, new legislation will require every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even a snippet of their articles. But Google will pull Spanish publishers from Google News and shut down the service in the region effective Dec. 16.
"As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable," Google News head Richard Gingras wrote in a blog post.
"For centuries publishers were limited in how widely they could distribute the printed page. The Internet changed all that," Gingras said. "Creating tremendous opportunities but also real challenges for publishers as competition both for readers' attention and for advertising Euros increased."
"We're committed to helping the news industry meet that challenge," he added, "and look forward to continuing to work with our thousands of partners globally, as well as in Spain, to help them increase their online readership and revenues."
Google's News service launched in September 2002, following an increased interest in news after the Sept. 11 attacks a year earlier. At the time, the tech giant invested in technology to help people search for and browse news items from various sources. In the 12 years since its launch, Google News has grown to include 72 different editions, presented in 30 languages, which draw from more than 50,000 news sources.
Google faced a similar battle in Germany this year, though inclusion in Google News there is at the discretion of the publisher. On Oct. 9, pages associated with certain media groups—namely Axel Springer, one of the largest digital publishers in Europe—started appearing only with a headline and direct link. Other German publishers not ensnared in the fight, like Der Spiegel, continued to have the usual blurbs and thumbnail images accompany their search results.
About a month later, though, Axel Springer was back, since removing snippets from Google News prompted a big drop in traffic to its newspapers' sites.
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