The results are in for a test Google carried out in eight European countries.
ADVERTISEMENTGoogle has said that news is unprofitable for its adverting business following the results of an experiment it ran in eight European countries.
The tech giant removed news from search results for 1 per cent of users for 2.5 months and on Friday announced the results of the test.
“The study showed that when we removed this content, there was no change to Search ad revenue and a <1% (0.8%) drop in usage,” Google said.
Paul Liu, Google’s director of economics, said in a statement that they have «seen a number of inaccurate reports that vastly overestimate the value of news content to Google».
The company added in the report that the actual ad revenue impact “could not be statistically distinguished from zero, either overall or by country”.
The experiment was carried out in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain.
The test was also intended for France, but a French court blocked the move and warned Google would be fined for breaking an agreement with the antitrust authority.
Google said the test was being carried out as part of the company’s compliance with the European Copyright Directive (EUCD), one of the European Union’s legal frameworks, and its licensing programme for EU news publishers.
The European law states that Google and similar bodies must pay news publishers for using parts of their content. However, the question of how much that content is worth could be an argument Google uses in negotiations.
France’s competition watchdog fined Google €250 million last year for breaches linked to intellectual property rules for news media publishers.
There were also concerns over Google’s AI service using news publisher content to train its AI models for free.
