Google says it has found news has “no measurable impact” on its advertising revenue following an experiment carried out in eight European countries.
Google removed news content from more than 13,000 EU domains for 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain for two-and-a-half months from 14 November to 31 January.
The test removed content from the relevant publishers from search results pages as well as Discover and Google News and included both logged-in (associated with a Google user ID) and logged-out (associated with browser cookies) users.
A simultaneous experiment on Google’s display ad cookie looked at the effects on its display advertising including first-party sites like Youtube and Gmail as well as third-party sites that use its tech.
Google concluded that search ad revenue “did not experience any decline, statistically significant or otherwise” and neither did its display advertising revenue.
Paul Liu, Google’s director, economics, said in a blog post that the tech company decided to do the test in response to “a number of inaccurate reports that vastly overestimate the value of news content to Google”.
Liu said: “The results have now come in: European news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google.”
Liu said that when news content was removed, there was “no change” to search ad revenue and a 0.8% drop in usage “which indicates that any lost usage was from queries that generated minimal or no revenue”.
“Beyond this, the study found that combined ad revenue across Google properties, including our ad network, also remained flat.”
Google Discover did see a revenue decline of a statistically significant 2% but the company said this aggregator service “makes only a very modest contribution” to its overall revenues.
In its report Google described the findings as a “fairly definitive answer” about both “the true economic value of news content in our services” and “the value of personal data associated
with news results across Google services”.
It noted that the experiment was not limited to search queries that would have displayed potentially eligible news content so that it could “analyse any spillover effects on Search and Discover beyond the affected queries”.
Google has been negotiating over payments to news publishers in the EU in response to the European Copyright Directive, which created a legal basis to secure payment for the use of news content beyond “very short extracts”.
Google has rolled out a licensing programme called Extended News Previews to more than 4,400 publications across 24 countries but says it has received numerous requests from regulators and publishers for data about the effect of news content in search on user behaviour and its impact on revenue.
Google said last year amid ongoing antitrust action by the French competition authority that it would be “taking steps to further analyse the true economic value of news content in our services” to help guide further negotiations. The test was originally also due to also take place in France but was paused due to this action.
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
