Google has on Thursday announced a new licensing program that will allow publishers earn money on high-quality content published on their sites.
This program will help participating publishers monetize their content through an enhanced storytelling experience that will provide readers an in-depth and factual analysis of current news.
According to a post on the Google blog, this becomes necessary in the midst of a global pandemic and concerns over the spread of misinformation and curated contents.
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The program will start later this year with publishers in a number of countries across the globe.
“Alongside other companies, governments and civic society organizations, we’re committed to playing our part to support news businesses. Today’s undertaking exemplifies that, and we look forward to what we can all achieve together,” the company said in its post.
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The company has already signed partnerships with local and national publications in German, Australia and Brazil.
“We are always keen to explore innovative ways to attract readers to our high-quality content,” says Stephan Ottlitz, managing director of Germany’s SPIEGEL Group, one of the publishing partners said.
“This interesting new partnership with Google will allow us to curate an experience that will bring our award-winning editorial voice into play, broaden our outreach and provide trusted news in a compelling way across Google products.”
Where available, Google will also offer to pay for free access for users to read paywalled articles on a publisher’s site. This will let paywalled publishers grow their audiences and open an opportunity for people to read content they might not ordinarily see.
This is only the most recent move of Google to support the news media as the Google news initiative had provided funding to more than 5300 local publications globally via a journalism emergency fund relief coma and ad-serving fee waiver on Google ad manager, among others.