Over the last few years, we have been running a program called Extended News Previews (ENP) in Europe. This is a licensing program for EU news publishers and is part of our compliance with Article 15 of the European Copyright Directive (EUCD).
After working with both individual publishers and collecting societies (groups that help manage publisher rights), we now have agreements for more than 4000 publications across 20 countries in the EU. We’re the first company to have implemented a program dedicated to EUCD compliance, which publishers of all sizes can benefit from. These agreements are based on consistent criteria which respect the law and existing copyright guidance, including how often a news website is displayed and how much ad revenue is generated on pages that also display previews of news content.
As we comply with these laws, regulators and publishers have asked for additional data about the effect of news content in Search on peoples’ use of our products. To meet this request, we will be running a small, time-limited test in which we don’t show results from EU-based news publishers in Google News, Search, and Discover. This test will affect 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. We will continue to show results from other websites, including news publishers based outside the EU. We intend to use this test to assess how results from EU news publishers impact the search experience for our users and traffic to publishers.
Once the test ends, news results will show up again as before. While the test is taking place, it won’t impact the payments we make to news publishers under the EUCD.
We’ve long provided publishers with detailed data on how their content performs on our platforms, including tools to understand traffic patterns, and we hope that this will provide even more useful, objective data. We run thousands of tests every year to see how people interact with changes in our products, and the impact these have on traffic.
We appreciate our longstanding partnership with the news industry and will continue to meet our obligations under the European Copyright Directive.