Google News Spain, a free aggregation service providing snippets of news and directing readers to the originating site, has closed after the Government announced new laws requiring the news service to pay for the news snippets it uses, the so-called Google Tax.
From Google:
We’re incredibly sad to announce that, due to recent changes in Spanish law, we have removed Spanish publishers from Google News and closed Google News in Spain. We understand that readers like you may be disappointed, too, and we want to share the reasons behind this decision.
Google News is a free service, loved and trusted by hundreds of millions of users around the world and available in more than 70 international editions, covering 35 languages. It includes everything from the world’s biggest newspapers to small, local publications and bloggers. Publishers can choose whether or not they want their articles to appear in Google News — and the vast majority choose to be included for very good reason. Google News creates real value for these publications by driving people to their websites, which in turn helps generate advertising revenues.
But sadly, as a result of a new Spanish law, we had to close Google News in Spain. This legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not. As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach was not sustainable.
We remain committed to helping the news industry meet challenges and look forward to continuing to work with our thousands of partners globally, as well as in Spain, to help them increase their online readership and revenues.
It was the publishers themselves who lobbied for the new law but those same publishers are now asking for help from the government because of the impact of the law, which has been an instant and dramatic decline in external traffic to their sites.
Links to Spanish sites are also removed from other content on non-Spanish versions of Google News, but they do remain available through a regular Google search.
Internal traffic to Spanish news sites has so far not suffered, with people now having to move from site to site rather than view all the information in one place. It is the external traffic to Spanish sites that is suffering and will no doubt impact on revenues, as others have found to their cost when attempting to pursue a similar path.
German publishers lobbied for a similar law to the one in Spain, although it doesn’t require that publishers charge for excerpts, as the Spanish law does. German publishers forced Google to remove their content, but after seeing the dramatic decline in traffic they quickly rescinded that request.