European news content has insignificant impact on our ad revenue, Google says

Google today publicly announced that news content from European publications has almost insignificant contribution to its ad revenue. In the company’s own words:

European news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google

Now, if you are scratching your head thinking why is Google even telling this publicly, then let me break down the things for you.

Europe has this EU Copyright Directive (EUCD), Article 15 of which focuses on “Protection of press publications”. Basically, EUCD’s Article 15 gives European publishers full control over the content they produce, making it mandatory for platforms like Google to compensate the publications in case they even show “very short extracts” of that content directly on their properties, like Google Search, Google News, and Discover.

In order to be compliant with this part of EUCD, Google launched a program called Extended News Previews (ENP) in Europe a few years ago, as part of which it reached agreements with EU publications. This happened in 2023, when Google revealed it had ENP agreements signed with over 1500 press publications in 15 EU countries. Then last year, the company revealed updated figures, saying the number of ENP agreements stood at 4000 in over 20 countries.

Explaining ENP a bit, Google had said:

These agreements are based on consistent criteria which respect the law and existing copyright guidance, including how often a news website is displayed and how much ad revenue is generated on pages that also display previews of news content

So far so good.

But then Google said EU regulators demanded exact data on what kind of impact the European news content has on people’s use of the company’s products like Search. I think what EU regulators wanted to see was if Google is compensating the press publications fairly or not – though I am not sure about this. My speculation roots from the fact that the company in its latest press release referred to “a number of inaccurate reports that vastly overestimate the value of news content to Google.”

Anyway, this prompted Google to run a small, time-limited experiment wherein the company – while continuing to give out compensations as per ENP agreements – stopped showing news content from EU-based press publications to 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.

Following is what the company had said about the test back then:

We intend to use this test to assess how results from EU news publishers impact the search experience for our users and traffic to publishers

The test ran from 14th November 2024 to 4th Feb 2025. And now, after analyzing the data, Google pushed out a press release wherein the company revealed the impact on revenue was negligible.

The study showed that when we removed this content, there was no change to Search ad revenue and a <1% (0.8%) drop in usage, which indicates that any lost usage was from queries that generated minimal or no revenue. Beyond this, the study found that combined ad revenue across Google properties, including our ad network, also remained flat

It’s worth noting that Google and EU have already locked horns on the Digital Market Act (DMA), so it’ll be interesting to see how EU responds to these EUCD-related findings from Google. Meanwhile, you can share your thoughts in the comment section below.

For more information, you can read Google’s latest press release, Google’s press release about the experiment, and Google’s press release about EUCD compliance.