Spanish News Sites See 15 Percent Drop In Views, Following Google News Shutdown

Google News has been removed from Spain, following the new licensing law on headlines in the country. The Spanish Newspaper Publishers Association (AEDE) wanted to receive payment for every news story aggregated, but Google didn’t agree.
It is not the first time old media has misunderstood Google News and tried to scrape even more revenue from the news aggregator, but similar to when this happened in Germany, Google moved out of the country until publishers asked them to return.


On the first day without Google News, publishers are seeing a 15 percent view drop in news stories nationwide. The same happened to Axel Springer in Germany, losing 40 percent of its viewers after pulling out of Google News.
It could get even worse for Spanish news organisations, since Google News is a good indexing tool for the search engine. Once new big stories start getting low search ranking, organisations might see over half of their reader-base gone.
At a time where advertising is pinnacle and the more eyes a news story gets, the better, it is rather odd for the Spanish publishing association to throw away the best traffic source. Google News does not make any revenue currently, making it a free-to-use property.
Analysts expect big dips in Spanish internet views over the next few months, and it will not stabilise as Google News is a consistent source of viewership. Unless the AEDE make some deal with Google, then publishers will most likely try to break the pact.