Yet another news media group has tried going up against Google over claims that Google should be paying for linking to their content in the Google search results.
A group of news publishers joined forced to form VG Media and were pressuring German regulators to go after Google for making their content available in the search results without monetary compensation. They were unsuccessful in their petition.
Andreas Mundt, the president of Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, said in a statement, “Sufficient suspicion is always necessary to initiate an abuse procedure. The complaint from VG Media did not establish this.”
There have been multiple cases of news publishers demanding that Google pay them for linking to their news stories, which many have seen as their way to figure out a revenue model in a changing world where print journalism isn’t as profitable as it was in the pre-internet era. However, since traffic via Google is usually responsible for a significant share of overall traffic, the benefits of traffic from Google, even without compensation, is seen a better than no traffic at all.
Of course, all website publishers can control whether or not Google will index their content by simply creating a robots.txt file banning Googlebot from crawling their site.
Jennifer Slegg
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