Thursday 30th November: Canadian government reaches deal with Google on Online News Act

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Mx3 AI is next week! Join Media Makers Meet and the Media Voices team in London on Dec 7th to explore how local news orgs, nationals, magazines and B2B publishers are getting to grips with AI.

The latest barrage in the ongoing battle between Google and publishers has been fired, as it appears Google and the Canadian government have struck a deal over the Online News Act. The agreement will see Canadian news sites continue to be shared on Google's platforms — in return for the search company making annual payments to news companies of around $100 million.

That isn’t exactly pocket money, but it’s also not going to phase Google all that much. It comes three weeks before the deadline on which Google was to drop Canadian news sources from its search results, over a dispute around whether it should or shouldn’t pay to link to those titles in the results.

As of time of writing this isn’t confirmed-confirmed by either Google or the Canadian government, so it could all change. It’s also unclear to what extent both parties have landed all the changes they wanted to the deal. It’s good that the public will continue to be able to find news sources in Google results, but this argument about what value Google adds or takes from the news ecosystem will rumble on, oooh, forever.

In this slot in yesterday’s newsletter I mentioned the BBC is seeking new opportunities for commercial revenue. Here’s why — it is desperately seeking to save money and optimise where it spends the cash it does have. And if that means cutting half the jobs on its flagship political programme to prioritise digital, apparently that’s a hard decision it feels it has to make.

As someone who's struggled to grow newsletter audiences for, ooh, almost a decade by now, this was really useful. It’s a roundup of some landing pages that are effective at getting people to sign up to newsletters, with examples of how they overcome the hassle gap through design or language. V useful!

And finally… it was only last week in this very newsletter slot that I wrote: “Here’s to Jezebel: I hope it gets a spiritual successor very soon.” Well, God is very quick these days. Paste Magazine has seen the value in Jezebel’s valuable and engaged audience — despite the risk of ad blacklists around the sort of journalism it produces — and is willing to take a punt on reviving the brand away from its former parent G/O Media.

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