14 DAY TRIAL // Axel Springer, the giant German publisher that had been complaining about Google’s nerve of displaying snippets from their articles in search results pages, has now withdrawn its demand for the Internet giant to start paying a fee to cover the copyright of the respective text.
As you may remember, German publishers went head to head with Google, asking to be paid for their copyrights on the text the company as using in search results. Google ejected every last one of them from the group, saying that they’d have to sign up on their own if they wanted to have their snippets attached to the links, with the condition of waiving their right to compensation.
The reason is simple – the snippets serve users who want to have a little more info before clicking through with a link. Google doesn’t think that it should pay for using a phrase, especially when it serves publishers.
Some were quick to sign up for Google’s news section, acknowledging that it would likely get in trouble without them. Others were stubborn enough to try it out on their own and see what happens when people don’t trust following links to their pages; one of them was Axel Springer.
The publisher said that traffic to the sites it owns declined by nearly 40 percent since Google stopped using snippets and thumbnails on October 23. It also claimed that traffic to the German sites from Google News dropped some 80 percent.
A way to document “Google's abuse of its dominant position”
Axel Springer is none too happy with having to offer Google a free license, but it says that its decision to go through the past two weeks was to prove that Google was taking advantage of its market power.
“The objective of this measure was to document the effects of the downgrading of search results as part of ongoing legal proceedings to enforce the existing press ancillary copyright law. Google abuses its dominant position on the market to force publishers to issue free licenses, thereby making the law, which came into force on 1 August 2013 ineffective. Publishers who refuse to accept this are forced to back down as a result of considerable economic pressure. The economic impact of this market abuse by Google has now been precisely documented,” the publisher writes.
They estimate that if things continued in the same manner, the financial damage resulting from lost marketing revenues would reach seven figures per brand over the year, as a whole.
For its part, Google is quite happy with the outcome of this entire situation, although it used the occasion to slap the publisher over the face for a minute. “It’s great to have snippets for Springer’s publications back in Google. We send over 500 million clicks to German publishers each month and our advertising partnerships have generated more than €1 billion ($1.25 billion) in revenue for them in the last three years,” the company told the Wall Street Journal, painting a better picture about the entire situation.