It was the great collateral damage of the so-called AEDE canon. When the copyright regulations linked to this fee were implemented in Spain, forcing online platforms to pay for indexing and aggregating services, Google announced that it was closing its popular Google News service .
The regulations were born with this service in mind and with forecasts of achieving a high remuneration for the media, but the closure of the service meant that it came to nothing. It simply burdened the results of the media that did not belong to the large groups.
Small media were its victims , losing traffic and thus indirectly revenue, and traffic in general suffered . Now, years later, Google News returns. Google has just announced on social media and on its corporate blog that it will resume the Google News service in Spain.
“Extra, extra! We are very excited to announce that Google News will be available again in Spain shortly,” the company’s Twitter account advances. “In 2014, we were forced to close Google News in Spain due to local legislation,” explains Fuencisla Clemares, VP Google Iberia , on the Google Spain corporate blog. “Today we can announce that Google News will soon reopen in our country,” he adds.
The change is marked by the approval of the new Royal Decree that regulates copyright and that functions as a transposition of the European norm to the Spanish scene. The exact date on which Google News will restart in Spain is not known, but Google speaks in its update of “early next year”. “In the coming months, we will work with the media to reach agreements that protect their rights under the new law,” the Google directive advanced in the post.
How Google News returns
In the thread on Twitter in which Google announces the return of the service, they point out that they will soon give the date and “all the latest news about this new relaunch.” For now, therefore, little and nothing is known about how the new Google News will be, although everything suggests that the interrupted service will resume in 2014 and that Google News will be in Spain as it is in other European countries.
You just have to cross the border to be able to access the service again, in fact. Google News indexes the information by topics of the moment and by thematic sections, then directing the visitor interested in knowing more to the page of the media in question where that information is published. For the media, it is a source of traffic and for Internet users, a way to find the information of the moment in a grouped way.
Of course, if in 2014 Google News were a showcase that worked very well and that helps to generate peak visits, in 2021 – or 22, when it seems that it will start again – things could be a bit different. The most important media have been trying to position themselves as an information showcase for a couple of years, encouraging Internet users to go to their home and be faithful to their content, in order to establish their subscription models. In Google News, more than the brand in the middle, what works is the topic of the moment.
