A study estimates that Facebook and Google must pay publishers for the use of their news content between $11.9 billion and $13.9 billion a year in the United States alone. The results of this report, Paying for news: what Google and Meta owe US publishers, were announced this morning in an event organized by the Medios.org Observatory at the Círculo de Bellas Artes that brought together the main media outlets. country information (Grupo Godó, Atresmedia, El Confidencial, Henneo, Prisa and Vocento) with some of the promoters of the study, such as the media and technology expert from Columbia University, Anya Schiffrin, and the economist Haaris Mateen from the University from Houston. The Nobel Prize winner in economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and the professor of marketing and journalism at the University of Navarra, Ángel Arrese, have also attended.
The study, also signed by the economist and consultant of The Brattle Group, Patrick Holder, has designed, among other issues, a methodology to calculate the economic compensation that the Facebook and Google Search platforms should pay news publishers for the use of news content, in case the legislative proposal Journalism Competition
According to the authors, the current agreements between these platforms and news publishers do not reflect the total value generated by news content on the platforms. The study estimates that these platforms owe publishers between 11.9 billion and 13.9 billion dollars a year in the United States alone, and explains the methodology they have used to make this calculation that could be applicable in other countries to determine what they consider a "fair price" to the publishers.
“We wanted to make a transparent methodology that can be verified and also replicated in other countries,” explains Schiffrin, one of the promoters of the study, and member of the Advisory Council of the Media Observatory.
Spain was a pioneer in negotiation between media and platforms by introducing a legal framework that regulated the mandatory collective management of publishers' rights, but this was no longer mandatory in 2021 with the transposition of the Copyright Directive. From then on, the negotiation of economic compensation for the use of news content by technology companies is at the discretion of the parties, which in practice opt for bilateral agreements, the conditions of which are unknown to the rest. This procedure, in the opinion of many experts, does not favor transparency and ends up harming smaller media outlets that do not have the same negotiating power.
In the last two years, some countries, such as Australia and Canada, have passed special legislation to force platforms to reach a fair agreement with the media. In 2024, an increase in alliances of news publishers around the world is expected to try again to obtain payments from Google, and possibly from Meta, influenced by the success of the Australian Media Bargaining Code, approved in 2021.
These alliances will be useful for the negotiations that must be carried out with technological platforms in the context of the expansion of AI, which uses news content in its large language models.
