Friday 1st October: Is there a funding formula behind Google's News Showcase?

October 01, 2021

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Buckle up, kids. This is a long one. Press Gazette has pulled together all the information it can find, plus some juicy comments from media executives all around the world, to try and draw a comparison of how Google's News Showcase is being rolled out.

Understandably (even if it's problematic), the payments made to publishers have been kept private. This however has opened up a huge can of worms in there being no standardisation around how publishers are compensated for their content appearing, leading to accusations of demotion for smaller 'partners', disproportionately generous deals for Murdoch and co., and some ad deals being thrown into the mix as well.

Are Google "making it up as they go along" and just paying what they think they can get away with, or is there really a carefully crafted "Showcase formula" that takes into account audience size, volume of content and subscription prices? If you make it to the end of this piece before Christmas, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

A must-read for any UX nerds. The Washington Post may have the luxury of a full engineering team dedicated to making the user experience as good as possible, but there's something we can all learn from their approach, especially how they balanced internal advertising demands with the need to meet Google's new performance metrics (Core Web Vitals).

This is an extract from FIPP's Big Tech and You report, which looks at the impact that players like Facebook and Google have had on the traditional media landscape. After dozens of interviews with media executives around the world, this piece sets out four broad approaches for how publishers can navigate the increasingly complex relationship with platforms.

I'll finish with something practical to take us into the weekend. When it comes to data analytics tools how do you know you've got the most important things covered, and what is best for you? This is a useful list of things to consider when comparing tools, in order to get the best solution for you.

This week's podcast:

The Manchester Mill is a subscription-based newsletter for the modern age. In this interview its founder Joshi Herrmann tells us why good local journalism demands having boots on the ground, how the sins of the past are impacting the journalism of today, and how he plans to expand into new cities and new revenue streams.

We won't pretend Instagram will be a major audience driver for us any time soon. But if you'd like to punctuate your friend's endless holiday snaps with occasional witticisms from us, do give us a follow.