Google LLC today detailed an upcoming program in which it will pay select publishers for content and, in some cases, potentially make paywalled articles freely available to its users.

The initiative comes amid mounting regulatory scrutiny of how tech firms use content created by media outlets. Last year, the European Union passed legislation allowing member states to require that companies such as Google pay for news articles they display to users. Australian authorities, meanwhile, are looking to compel Google and Facebook to compensate local publishers for content they use in their services.  

The program Google announced today may help it better address emerging regulatory requirements. Brad Bender, Google’s vice president of product management for news, said the search giant will license content from publishers for an upcoming “new news experience” set to launch later in 2020. The new experience will become available in Google News and Discover, a curated article feed available on Android. 

“This program will help participating publishers monetize their content through an enhanced storytelling experience that lets people go deeper into more complex stories, stay informed and be exposed to a world of different issues and interests,” Bender wrote in a blog post. “While we’ve previously funded high-quality content, this program is a significant step forward in how we will support the creation of this kind of journalism.”

Axios reported that Google will pay publishers for not only text content but also video, audio and images. The program may extend to paywalled articles as well in some cases. According to Google’s Bender,  the search giant will offer to pay publishers make articles they place behind a paywall freely accessible to its users. 

“This will let paywalled publishers grow their audiences and open an opportunity for people to read content they might not ordinarily see,” the executive wrote.

Google has so far inked deals with more than 10 publishers from Australia, Brazil and Germany to license content for the program. The search giant is also holding talks with publishers in a half-dozen other countries with a goal of signing multiple new partners over the coming months.

Google already has a number of programs to support publishers, most notably the Google News Initiative it launched in 2018 with an initial $300 million budget. The initiative has provided funding for more than 5,300 local publications worldwide.

Google’s announcement of the content licensing program may potentially influence the direction Facebook takes with its regulatory strategy in this area. Similarly to Google, the social network is facing pressure from Australian regulators to pay for news content, and pressure is building elsewhere as well.

Facebook already licenses stories from some publishers for the Facebook News section of its platform. It was reported last year that the company had offered news outlets as much as $3 million a year for the right to use their content. 

Image: Google