Google Pressures Media to Agree to AI Model Training Authorization by Withholding Showcase Licensing Fees

According to Dynamic Beating monitoring, Google has recently been promoting the News AI pilot project to news media and has proposed new conditions. Participating publishers must authorize their content for AI model training. Otherwise, after the closure of the old News Showcase partnership project, they will no longer receive regular licensing fees.

In the past, Google paid media outlets a fixed annual fee through the Showcase project to display selected articles on Google News and drive traffic to their websites. The new AI pilot project, on the other hand, requires media outlets to authorize their content for large-scale model training to generate AI article summaries on Google News and Gemini. Although Google claims the summaries are meant to encourage user clicks, with referral traffic from Google search plummeting by nearly half, media outlets are concerned that users will only consume information within the Google ecosystem, leading to a significant erosion of web traffic.

Today, with Google's traffic dwindling, media outlets have taken a tougher stance. Many executives believe that the residual value of Google's referral traffic is no longer worth providing news content to train Gemini robots and are even considering outright blocking Google's crawling. To enforce the new agreement, Google plans to gradually phase out the old Showcase project, converting the annual fee into a bargaining chip for the new project. Media outlets that agree to AI licensing can continue to receive payments; otherwise, cooperation fees will be completely cut off. The Washington Post and The Guardian have joined the pilot as initial partners. However, as Google has recently become more rigid in its approach, more media outlets are accelerating the establishment of independent subscription and registration systems in an attempt to reduce reliance on Google.