Washington: As small and medium newspapers shut shop and big media houses handed over pink slips to journalists worldwide, Google alone made a whopping $4.7 billion from its Search and Google News in 2018 — nearly as much as the entire US news industry made as a whole last year.
According to a report in The New York Times, compared to Google, the news industry in the US made an estimated $5.1 billion from digital advertising.
The report took the data from the News Media Alliance which represents more than 2,000 newspapers across the US.
“The journalists who create that content deserve a cut of that $4.7 billion. They make money off this arrangement and there needs to be a better outcome for news publishers,” David Chavern, President and chief executive of the alliance, was quoted as saying.
The alliance noted that its estimation is a conservative one, “as it does not include the value of personal data that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, gathers when users click on news articles”.
According to Chavern, an outcome of any conversation generated by the study would be the passage of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.
