Google earned 5.59 trillion won from its news service last year

It has been reported that U.S. largest search engine Google gained 4.7 billion U.S. dollars, or 5.59 trillion won, by utilizing news service last year. The U.S. Congress has recently embarked on the monopoly by platform businesses dominating the internet ad market including Google and Facebook. Against this backdrop, U.S. media outlets are expected to strongly demand platform businesses to distribute their profits.

Google earned 4.7 billion dollars last year based on media content delivered by the “Google News” section and search services, according to a New York Times article citing a report by the News Media Association. The figure is as large as the total revenue of 5.1 billion dollars earned by the overall U.S. news industry’s digital ad market last year. Furthermore, Google’s media content brought more profits than the recent film “The Avengers: Endgame.”

The News Media Alliance (NMA) consists of around two thousand newspaper agencies across the United States. The organization released the report one day before a public hearing is held to discuss the relationship between tech giants and media at the House of Representatives.

Currently, Google has not made its news revenues publicly available. The alliance estimated Google’s news content revenues based on a report by consulting firm Keystone Strategy. It has been assessed that 40 percent of searches on Google led to news content.

The U.S. media industry has criticized Google and Facebook for not paying a price for their enormous ad revenues driven by news content, which has caused management difficulties among media outlets. Around 1,800 newspaper agencies across the United States have closed down since 2004, according to a study of North Carolina University, which was cited by The Washington Post. The so-called “news deserts,” regions without any local news media outlet, are increasing as well.


Yong Park parky@donga.com