Google sends users to news sites 24 bn times a month, helps publishers grow

Google is sending users to news sites 24 billion times every month, providing an opportunity for publishers to grow their audiences and show Google users ads or offers for subscriptions, the tech giant has revealed, saying it is invested in helping journalism not only survive, but thrive.

Deloitte puts a value of each click for large publishers at roughly between 4-7 US cents.

According to Richard Gingras, VP, News, the value of news to Google is about informing and educating, not economics.

"Nearly all of our revenue comes not from news queries, but from queries with commercial intent, like someone searching for a new 'toaster' and clicking on an ad. Google gets paid for search ads only when someone clicks on one," he said in a statement on Friday.

Google on Thursday announcing a new licensing programme to pay publishers for high-quality content to help them weather the Covid-19 crisis.

To begin with, Google has signed partnerships with local and national publications in Germany, Australia and Brazil, and is in discussions to expand to more partnerships and countries.

Gingras said that the company invests in ad technologies that thousands of news publishers around the world choose to use to grow their digital advertising businesses.

"We analyzed the revenue data of 100 news publishers globally with the highest programmatic revenue generated in Google Ad Manager. On average, we found news publishers keep over 95 percent of the digital advertising revenue they generate when they use Ad Manager to show ads on their websites," he stressed.

Five years ago, it took an average of 19 seconds to load a page on a mobile browser.

"Instead of building a format to work just on Google, we combined forces with publishers and other tech companies to improve the mobile web for everyone. That was how the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, or AMP, was born," informed Gingras.

Following feedback from publishers who wanted to participate in the Top Stories Carousel feature in Google Search without using AMP, the company recently announced page performance signals.

"This change will allow all qualifying web content to be eligible for this feature while keeping a high-quality user experience as a top priority," said Google.

To date, The Google News Initiative (GNI) has provided funding to more than 5,300 local publications globally via a Journalism Emergency Relief Fund, an ad-serving fee waiver on Google Ad Manager and a $15 million Support Local News Campaign to help alleviate some immediate economic constraints.