News Broadcasters Association writes to Google India on share of ad revenues

News Broadcasters Association, an industry body of news TV channels, has urged Google India to ensure that news publishers are compensated and paid with “universal parity” across the globe.

The industry body has also raised concerns about the unfair distribution of ad revenues and the shrinking advertising pie in the digital space as technology giants take away the major chunk. “News organizations make heavy investments in employing anchors, journalists and reporters to gather, verify and deliver credible information but are inadequately compensated – the largest share of advertising revenue flows disproportionately to Intermediary Technology Platforms such as Google, YouTube, Facebook etc,” a letter written by NBA President Rajat Sharma to Google India added.

Stating that digital platforms have fundamentally changed the way media content is produced, distributed and consumed, the news broadcasters industry body pointed out to a power imbalance between traditional media/news organisations and big-tech/digital technology platforms.

“Google plays a key role in this value chain as an intermediary and plays a part in delivering this news content to its audiences albeit without sufficiently compensating the content owners,” the letter added.

This letter comes at a time when countries like Australia and France are looking at enacting legislations to ensure tech giants adequately pay news publishers.

“Google has recently agreed to compensate and pay publishers in France, Australia and the European countries… Being a multinational organization following global best practices in all the countries it operates, the expectation is that Google will employ principles of universal parity in dealing with News Content owners and employ similar norms in India, “ the NBA stated in its letter. The Hindu Business Line