Sources: Google is in talks with publishers, mostly outside the US, about paying a licensing fee for content that would be in a premium news product
The search giant is in talks with some publishers about paying a fee for content that would be part of a premium news product
Wall Street JournalBenjamin Mullin
Context & Ripple Effects
This February 2020 report is the earliest signal of what became Google's paid-content era: within months, the talks crystallized into a formal licensing program under the Google News Initiative, and by October Google had committed $1B+ through 2023 to pay publishers for high-quality journalism via News Showcase, starting in Germany and Brazil. The 'mostly outside the US' detail matters because it foreshadowed where the money actually landed first — including a framework agreement with French media once European regulatory pressure made payment unavoidable.
First-order effects
Publishers in non-US markets gain a direct new revenue line from Google for content that previously flowed to search and news surfaces unpaid, with the WSJ-reported talks covering a premium news product rather than ad revenue share.
Second-order effects
Once the first licenses are signed, per-outlet fee benchmarks get set that later deals inherit — the pattern visible when Google agreed to pay News Corp $5M–$6M annually for AI-related content years later.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, publisher economics split into two tracks: freely crawled distribution versus negotiated licensing, with the same licensed corpus increasingly serving both consumer news products and AI training/recruitment projects like the one Google was still scouting outlets for in 2025.
The trend: Publisher content is shifting from an unpaid input to a negotiated license, with Google's repeated payments — Showcase, France, News Corp, AI pilots — turning licensing into a standing cost of aggregating journalism.
A key caveat in this: Most of the publishers in talks with Google are outside the U.S. Google made $134 billion in ad revenue last year. Total US media ad revenue: $212 billion. https://www.wsj.com/...
@BuzzFeedBen @MediagazerChat @peretti And vice versa. Resentment develops. The developers lose. There's no win-win or lose-lose. It's developers lose, period. The only way it has a chance of working is if the devs have a distribution system to fall back on when the end comes.
@BuzzFeedBen @MediagazerChat @peretti I should explain. There's a long history of platform vendors and software developers. I've been around this loop at least a half dozen times. Competition is there at the start and develops over time. The PV has its own internal logic, that th…
BIG scoop. Google has an opportunity to do right here and make friends. Arguably overlooked is that the new copyright directive rolling out in EU requires Google News to pay unless you buy into Google's lobby that it's just going to pull out entirely. I don't. https://twitter.com…
WSJ Exclusive: The search giant is in talks with some publishers about paying a fee for content that would be part of a premium news product @benmullin has the story. https://www.wsj.com/... $GOOG
Google reportedly could follow Facebook in paying publishers for content but this time it's for a premium offering. Will it be called Google News+? https://www.wsj.com/...