How Google supports journalism and the news industry in India

Google is committed to supporting open access to information. Our products give people choice and help them find more high-quality journalism — from international stories to community reporting — than ever before.

Over the past 20 years, we’ve collaborated closely with the news industry and provided billions of dollars to support the creation of quality journalism in the digital age. Through both our services and our direct funding of news organizations, Google is one of the world’s biggest financial supporters of journalism.

Our commitment to news

Our products are built to provide relevant and useful information for everyone, ensuring that people around the world are able to find quality news. As part of this, we play a constructive role in enabling a sustainable, independent, and diverse news ecosystem.

We've demonstrated that commitment over decades of financial support by providing billions of dollars — sharing revenue with news publishers via our ad network, developing tools, training and funding through programs like the Google News Initiative, and launching Google News Showcase. All of these have led to us paying news organizations significant amounts of money.

These efforts help people get the quality news and information that matters to them and their community.

We deliver significant value and funding to news organizations

Every news organization can choose whether they want to be in Google Search and Google News. Most do because it results in valuable free traffic.

Each month, people click through from Google Search and Google News results to publishers' websites more than 24 billion times. The traffic we send to news sites helps publishers increase their readership, build trust with readers and earn money.

Our advertising technology helps news organizations make money by showing ads on their websites, apps and videos. Every year we pay out billions of dollars directly to the publishing partners in our ad network.

We also pay to license content through Google News Showcase, a new online experience that’s powered by a $1 billion investment in news organizations. Google News Showcase is rolling out in India with 30 news publishers including national, regional and local news organizations like The Hindu Group, HT Digital Streams Ltd, Indian Express Group, ABP LIVE, India TV, NDTV, Zee News, Amar Ujala, Deccan Herald, Punjab Kesari, The Telegraph India, IANS (Indo Asian News Service) and ANI. This builds on News Showcase deals signed by 700 news publications in more than a dozen countries, including Germany, Brazil, Canada, France, Japan, the U.K. Australia, Czechia, Italy and Argentina, more than 90% of them representing local or community news — with discussions underway in several other countries.

And we’re committed to finding new ways to support the news industry. This includes Subscribe with Google, which we built with news publishers to help them make money from new subscribers, as well the Google News Initiative, through which we provide tools, training and grant funding to help news organizations evolve in the digital age. The Google News Initiative includes a $300 million funding commitment to the future of the news industry.

Reflecting on our Google News Initiative work in India

Our efforts have reached every corner of the world, including India. In June 2018, we launched the GNI India Training Network, in partnership with BoomLive, DataLeads and Internews. So far, the program has trained over 25,000 Indian journalists in-person or via virtual live workshops in 10 languages, touching 1,000+ news organizations and 700+ universities. And, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, we provided financial support to 228 news organizations in India through the Journalism Emergency Relief Fund. For example, Minnambalam, a Tamil language publication from Chennai, will be able to keep their newsroom going, the funding giving them the confidence and financial support needed to carry on with their work.

In partnership with the WAN IFRA, we’ve launched the Asia-Pacific Subscriptions Lab, which aims to help publishers improve how they attract, retain and earn revenue from subscribers. Eight publishers including The Hindu participated in the intensive four-month program. As our report on the Subscriptions Lab shows, publishers are already seeing positive results. The Hindu, for example, achieved a 50% increase in sign-ups by removing sign-up barriers and making offers more visible and easier to compare. We’re also actively working to support and inject new ideas into the news industry under GNI APAC Innovation Challenge and funding programs; 16 media outlets in India have already benefited from this.

We continue to support newsroom talent across the region with a range of verification programs. Last year, we provided a $1M grant via Google.org for Internews to train journalists, fact checkers, academics, NGOs to fight misinformation and fake news across the country. And as vaccination programs pick up pace, we’re backing organizations working to combat pandemic-related misinformation with stringent fact-checking. Through GNI’s global COVID-19 Vaccine Counter-Misinformation Open Fund, we’re providing grants to three important fact-checking projects in the region.

These are just a few examples of our ongoing efforts to support the news industry. We’re expanding our GNI efforts in India to include new programs like the GNI Transformation Lab and GNI Advertising Lab to help small and mid-sized local news organizations achieve financial sustainability and elevate quality journalism.

Facts about Google & news

News websites are in control

An illustration of Search results displaying news content, and a settings gear icon

Google Search and Google News provide links to useful and relevant news stories to help you find the information you’re looking for about current events.

Every news organization has control over whether and how their headlines and links appear in Google Search and News. Most welcome the fact that people can find them in Google search results — but if a news site (or any other site for that matter) doesn’t want to show up or wants to control what is shown on Google, they can choose to do so. They can do that whether their site is paywalled or free to view.

Google does not “steal” or “use” news publisher content. We link to it. Publishers decide to be included in Google Search because they want to be found by a broader audience.

We don’t make money from Google News

An illustration of a digital page displaying a drop down option and text.

There have been wildly inaccurate assertions about the value of news to Google. News websites are a small slice of the information on the internet. In the past year, news-related queries on Search accounted for under 2% of total queries on Google Search globally.

We don’t show ads — or make money — on the vast majority of searches. And we don’t run ads on Google News or the news results tab on Google Search.

Nearly all of the ads people see on Google are on searches with commercial intent like “t-shirts,” "sports shoes" or "diapers," and generally not from news-seeking queries. And we only make money if ads are useful and relevant, as indicated by your click on the ad.

Although we don’t run ads on Google News or the news results tab, we do help news organizations show ads on their websites, apps and videos. Many news publishers use our advertising tools and platforms. Every year, we pay out billions of dollars directly to the publishing partners in our ad network.

We pay for content

An illustration showing a search bar alongside various websites displaying content including text and images

With Google News Showcase, we have committed $1 billion over the next three years to pay publishers to produce editorially curated content experiences and for limited free user access to paywalled content.

News Showcase is made up of panels that give news organizations the ability to package the most important stories of the day for readers, providing deeper storytelling and more context through features like timelines, bullets, related stories and a list of important articles. This content currently appears in Google News and Discover, bringing trusted news to readers all over the world.

700 publications across more than a dozen countries are part of News Showcase today, spanning global, national, regional, metro and local publications. In India, we are rolling out Google News Showcase together with 30 news publishers including national, regional and local news organizations like The Hindu Group, HT Digital Streams Ltd, ABP Live, Republic World, India TV, Zee News, Amar Ujala, Deccan Herald, Punjab Kesari, The Telegraph India, IANS (Indo Asian news service), and ANI (Asian News International).

We look forward to partnering with even more publications for News Showcase.

Google generates traffic and revenue for news publishers

A bar and line chart goes up and to the right. Around the chart are bubbles with currency symbols (£, $, ¥)

Each month, people click through from Google Search and Google News results to publishers' websites more than 24 billion times — that’s over 9,000 clicks per second.

Publishers use Google’s advertising tools to make money

For many years we’ve helped publishers make money by providing tools and technology that help them run digital advertising on their websites and apps.

Our ad technologies enable news organizations to sell their ad space to millions of advertisers around the world — including advertisers they wouldn’t have access to without these services.

When publishers choose to use our advertising services, they keep a significant majority of the revenue that’s generated. Every year, we pay out billions of dollars directly to the publishing partners in our ad network.

Publishers use Google's subscription tools to make money

Subscribe with Google helps publishers drive new subscribers and engage existing subscribers across the web. Since launching in 2018, this technology has generated over 400,000 new paid subscribers for our news partners. In the last six months alone, partners have grown their subscription base by 100,000.

Publishers control how they deploy Subscribe with Google on their own sites, and keep 85% to 95% of the revenue, while also owning the customer relationship.

Supporting the future of news

A ladder and various "building block" images sit around and in front of an illustration of a webpage.

Through the Google News Initiative (GNI), we collaborate with the news industry in creating, testing and implementing new ways to reach readers in the digital age.

Thirty years ago newspapers were one of the only sources of information in their communities. But now they must compete with thousands of new sources of information, while classified revenue and circulation have plunged. This has necessitated the development of new business and distribution models and new techniques to produce news.

The GNI works directly with news organizations of all sizes on developing new products, programs and partnerships to help news publishers grow their business. It includes a $300 million funding commitment to news organizations.

Since 2018, the GNI has supported more than 6,250 news partners in 118 countries around the world. In response to the COVID-19 crisis, we provided financial support to 228 news organizations in India through the GNI Journalism Emergency Relief Fund. And 1.7 million journalists have used the GNI Training Center designed to help strengthen their digital skills. In India, we’ve provided training for over 25,000 journalists on skills including digital verification, data visualization, and machine learning through in-person training.

As part of our continued support to the Indian news industry, we’re expanding our GNI efforts to help small and mid-sized local news organizations succeed online. Many news publishers have successfully used technology and tools to diversify business models, and find growth and new revenue. The GNI is intended to support these efforts.

What others are saying

… Publishers make more money from the traffic and subscriptions they gain through platforms than platforms do from monetizing the material publishers put there.

Washington Post editorial board
The Google News Initiative helped us understand the advancements in publishing, analytics and the changes coming up in the privacy landscape. It sensitized us to plan ahead for the same. However, since change is the only constant, we look forward to a similar program for the coming year, which can help us further our strategy in absolutely trying times.

Kaiwant Shah, Digital Head of Free Press Journal, a more than 90 years old Indian-English daily newspaper
If a publisher doesn’t like how Google displays snippets of its content, for instance, it’s free to adjust those settings or to opt out entirely. Neither aggregator impedes consumers from visiting news sites directly if they so choose. And … [Google has] voluntarily committed hundreds of millions of dollars to newsrooms around the world in recent years.

Bloomberg Editorial Board
The truth is many publishers have failed to find a workable digital business model.

FT Editorial Board
The precedent of having to pay for the privilege of linking to someone is antithetical to the core ethic of the web: that the edges finally win over the power at the center.

Jeff Jarvis, Author, Journalism Director, City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism
The nature of a search engine is to index websites and provide ranked lists of results to users. This is both a service to consumers searching for a product or information, and to individuals, companies and other providers that offer products and information. Traditionally, users would have to pay for access to such a service and providers would have to pay for listing. But Google has been a pioneer of novel advertising models that have made this free to both consumers and providers.

David M W Powers, Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, Flinders University, Australia
… If tech businesses have to pay simply to provide links to information, or short snippets from websites, the free and open internet will be no more.

Chris Marchese, Netchoice (Counsel, Industry Coalition)
Independent media including local and smaller outlets are the lifeblood of democracy … [A] "link-tax" approach ultimately won’t work for smaller media outlets.

Iverna McGowan, Europe Director, Center for Democracy & Technology
Turning every instance of link sharing into a government-mandated monetary transaction would forever alter the fundamental openness of the internet.

Timothy Karr, Senior Director of Strategy for Free Press Action Fund
An analysis of the revenues of newspapers over nearly two decades, recently conducted for Google by the economists at AlphaBeta, reveals how and over what time period the old business model for newspapers broke. In 2002, Australian newspapers collected 96% of all classified advertising, which amounted to $1.6 billion. By 2018, the total classified advertising market had grown to $1.9 billion, but only 12% of that was going to newspapers — the rest has splintered off to specialist online providers such as Domain, Realestate.com.au, Carsales and Seek.

AlphaBeta analysis
This is fundamentally against the principles of an open internet. The government saying that you can't link to a news site unless you pay a tax should be seen as inherently problematic for a long list of reasons.

Mike Masnick, Editor of the Techdirt blog
… After 20 years in the media reform movement, I can’t believe the answer to the problem of ensuring production of local news from diverse sources — especially traditionally marginalized voices — is to have a government-supervised wealth transfer between the biggest digital platforms and the biggest media conglomerates.

Harold Feld, Senior Vice President, Public Knowledge

Latest news & helpful links

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