Following the closure of Google News, traffic to Spanish media sites fell

    As promised , on December 15, 2014, Google removed all Spanish media from the Google News news aggregator. The company took this step after Spain passed a law according to which from January 1, 2015, search engines will be charged for displaying the text of media publications in the search results.

    The new law was lobbied by the publishers themselves. They considered that they could attract up to € 80 million of additional income from an American company. In reality, everything turned out differently.

    The website http://news.google.es/ stopped working on December 15 at 20:30 ET. When entering the same address, a message is displayedfrom Google in Spanish, explaining that companies are “extremely sad to report” about the exclusion of publishers and the closure of the site, but there is no way to pay news sites for content snippets, because Google News itself does not make any money.

    According to statistics from the web analytics service Chartbeat, traffic to Spanish media sites decreased by 10-15% within a few hours after the closure of Google News ...



    At the same time, the number of clicks on "internal" links between different media sites increased.

    The graph shows external clicks on links to Spanish sites, with the exception of clicks from search results and social networks 15 hours after the closure of Google News yesterday (blue) and for the same period last week (green)

    The Chartbeat service collects statistics from approximately 50 sites, from small media to large newspapers. Chartbeat specialists say that the difference in site traffic is very significant.

    It should be noted that a similar situation was observed in Germany after the adoption of a similar law on "tax on Google." Then the Google News aggregator also excluded German publishers from the index, demanding payment of royalties, but after a sharp drop in attendance, they backtracked and entered into a separate agreement with Google, abandoning claims.

    True, in Germany the drop in attendance was more significant than 10-15%.

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