The Google News Shutdown in Spain Is An Empty Victory for Publishers

Image: Google

We call it the “Google News bump.” When a story on Wired.com gets a link on the front page of Google News, traffic skyrockets. Readers click. Ads are served.

But in Spain, at least, the Google News bump is no more. On Tuesday, Google shut down Google News in Spain in response to a law that requires news aggregators to pay a fee for the right to post snippets of stories. Big Spanish publishers pushed for the law, but their math is hard to fathom. Without Google News, they get no bump, nor do they get any fee. Trying to stick it to Google is an understandable impulse, a resentment fed by the company’s monolithic influence over the web. But all the shutdown really shows is how powerless traditional publishers really are.

José Gabriel González, the director of the Spanish publishers’ association that pushed for the law, told The Wall Street Journal that his group didn’t expect to see much of an impact from Google News going dark in Spain. Overall, group members were getting about five percent of their traffic from Google News, according to the Journal.

Well, okay. But where I work, at least, a five percent traffic dip wouldn’t exactly something to celebrate, much less lobby lawmakers to effectively codify. And as GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram says, the damage could be worse. The chief data scientist at Chartbeat, a web service many publishers use to monitor real-time reader traffic, told Ingram that the average falloff in the hours since the Google News shutdown was more like 10 to 15 percent.

Nothing to Smile About

In the US, a combination of fair use and the First Amendment means a law like Spain’s would likely never fly. In any case, US publishers have long since turned their attention to trying to figure out how to get the best placement on massive traffic-driving services—Google News, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit—rather than regulate those links out of existence. Europe, on the other hand has shown a much greater appetite for using the law to try to break Google’s dominance.

But no law is likely to undo the technological changes that have made what traditional publishers do less valuable. Tech industry big thinker Ben Thompson, writing on his site Stratechery, describes the “smiling curve” of publishing, where value is created by the individuals who create content and the big aggregators that help readers discover it. Publishers, meanwhile, languish in the trough of “content delivery,” which the web makes trivially easy. “In short,” Thompson writes, publishers (all of them, not just newspapers) don’t really have an exclusive on anything anymore.”

Spain’s publishers may feel like they’ve struck a blow against Google, but the demand for the service it provides won’t go away. The currency of online publishing is attention, and attention on the internet inevitably flows toward aggregation. Publishers could try to capture some of that flow by creating alternatives to Google News, but any dam built against it just won’t hold. If there’s anything the internet as a medium is good at, it’s finding ways to go around.