Newspaper revenue in Europe: the causes of the decline in recent years

The relationship between Google and editorial publications has always been rather stormy, especially in Western Europe, since – among other accusations and rather simplifying it all – the media believe that the search engine takes advantage too freely of their content to be shown in the SERP, thus causing a reduction in readers, and which can also in some way systematically penalize the positioning of some content to favor others (as stated a few months ago by the Daily Mail). The underlying thesis is that Google is responsible for the sharp drop in revenues of European newspapers that has occurred in recent years, but a search by Accenture (commissioned by Google) seeks to clarify the real causes of this phenomenon.

Accusations to Google by the news industry

The loss of advertising revenue in the digital age has been a constant theme for over twenty years around the world and a large part of the so-called news industry tends to blame companies like Google and Facebook for this contraction.

Although “revenues from digital readers are growing at a promising pace, there is no doubt that the publishers’ business model has been questioned in recent decades,” writes Eero Korhonen, Head of News and Publisher Partnerships, Google in Europe, Middle East and Africa. For this reason, some critics have argued that “if Google and Facebook did not exist, much of the printed newspaper revenue would remain with news publishers”, accusing these technological platforms of having directly “shattered