Share ad revenues with Indian news platforms, NBA asks Google

Citing the increased burden that digital news businesses have come under because of “unfair distribution of advertising revenues” and “opaqueness of the advertising system”, the News Broadcasters Association has urged Google to compensate news news publishers in India like it does in Australia, France and other European countries, Exchange 4 Media reported on Thursday.

In a letter to Google India, the association said, “News organisations 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.”

The letter added that while Google plays a key role in the value chain by delivering content to news audiences, it does so without compensating the content owners sufficiently.

“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 letter added.