Slippery Slope: Is Google Now Paying More Newspapers To Link To Them?
We were surprised last month to hear that Google had backed down in its dispute with news agency AFP, agreeing to pay up in order to link to AFP articles in Google News. As has been explained repeatedly, Google is increasing traffic and attention to their sites.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's AFP settlement follows an earlier payment deal with Associated Press, making compensation for inclusion in Google News a visible pattern among major wire services. Techdirt had also argued in April that Google's linking was not content theft, framing the dispute around whether referral traffic substitutes for direct payment.
The report of agreements with large UK news groups is unconfirmed, but the question matters because each negotiated exception weakens Google's simple claim that indexing chiefly benefits publishers through traffic.
First-order effects
- AFP receives payment from Google for links to its articles in Google News, resolving their dispute and turning inclusion into a negotiated commercial arrangement.
- Google News must absorb the cost and administrative burden of licensing at least some news content rather than relying solely on publishers' willingness to be indexed.
Second-order effects
- Associated Press and other large news suppliers gain a clearer bargaining reference point from the AFP settlement and the earlier AP payment deal.
- Publishers weighing whether Google News referrals are sufficient compensation gain leverage to seek individual terms, particularly where their content is difficult to replace.
Third-order effects
- If bilateral payments spread, news indexing may become a licensing market led by large agencies, raising the transaction costs of maintaining broad publisher coverage.
- The dispute points toward a more fragmented relationship between search platforms and publishers, in which the value of distribution is negotiated rather than presumed.
The trend: News publishers are testing whether search-driven traffic can be converted into direct licensing revenue from the platforms that aggregate their work.