It's not just news publishers in Europe that are looking to accelerate their destruction, it's happening all over the world. Brazilian newspapers, the 90 percent or so that are part of the Association of Newspapers in Brazil, have pulled out of Google News.
What this means is that stories from those newspapers won't show up in the News aggregator. They will still be visible in search results though.
The move comes from a common problem, the newspapers wanted to be paid for the titles and few sentences Google used to push users to those news sites.
Google obviously thought this was ridiculous and would not pay for doing the newspapers a favor, i.e. sending them more users. Having reached an impasse, the association asked all of its members to opt out of Google News.
While the decision may sound drastic and counterintuitive, it's not as bad as it looks. Google News isn't that big, especially in Brazil.
That was part of the complaint in fact, the traffic newspapers got from Google News was too little to offset for the "damage" they perceived.
They, like many other newspapers, believe that, having read a title and several sentences, people would not want to go read the full story. Newspapers somehow say this is Google's fault and not their own for writing stories that people don't read.
They're upset that they can't trick people into visiting their site before finding out that the story is poorly written or misleading, thus depriving them of valuable page views.
Of course, the fact that so few people come from Google News would suggest that News itself wasn't that popular, which would mean it's not that valuable for Google either. Google News doesn't have any ads and doesn't make Google any money.
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