Goodbye to Google News? The test, the impact and publishers’ reactions
Goodbye Google News? For the past few days, 1 percent of users in eight European countries, including Italy, can no longer find results from Union publishers in Google News, Discover and even Google Search. This is not a mistake, but a test by Google, which chose to suspend the visibility of European newspapers on its main services for a selected sample. The stated goal is to assess the impact that editorial content has on user experience, traffic to news sites and, more generally, on the entire ecosystem of information digitization. This unilateral and apparently unforeseen choice has provoked the concerned reaction of publishers, who also in the past saw Google as a kind of competitor for traffic. In short, the new chapter in the dispute opens new scenarios on the now frayed relations between Big Tech and the publishing world, which we try to shed light on by analyzing tensions, numbers and future prospects for news publishers.