A new study commissioned by German media rights group Corint Media alleges that Google owes the country’s publishers approximately €1.3 billion annually for using their journalistic content. This claim, based on a behavioral economics experiment, dramatically escalates the global conflict between news organizations and tech giants, as publishers report what one outlet has called an “AI armageddon” for their industry.
The core of the issue is the rise of AI-driven search summaries, like Google’s AI Overviews, which directly answer user queries. This fundamental shift in user behavior means that AI is “tanking referrals to news sites,” a dynamic that threatens the referral traffic that has long been the lifeblood of online journalism. The new study from consulting firm FehrAdvice & Partners attempts to quantify this value, arguing that journalistic content adds a substantial, and currently uncompensated, benefit to Google’s search product.
Corint Media, which represents a wide swath of German private media, argues this value is being taken without adequate payment. Its managing director, Dr. Christine Jury-Fischer, explained that platforms using content without fair compensation creates a massive problem for the financing of the media ecosystem.
The Billion-Euro Calculation
The FehrAdvice study arrives at its €1.3 billion demand through a multi-step calculation detailed in a summary of its findings. It begins with an estimate of Google’s annual search advertising revenue in Germany at roughly €8 billion. From there, it posits that informational searches account for €4.4 billion of that total. Based on its user preference experiment, the study concludes that the value Google derives specifically from journalistic content is €3.2 billion.
The final €1.3 billion claim is derived from applying a revenue-sharing model to that figure. According to a report in Meedia, Corint Media’s Co-CEO Markus Runde considers this a conservative estimate, stating, “We consider our calculation to be conservative. The actual value that Google derives from journalistic content is likely to be even higher.”
This detailed financial claim is a new front in a long-running battle. For years, publishers have argued for compensation, a dispute that in Germany is currently before an arbitration board at the German Patent and Trademark Office.
Google has consistently pushed back, arguing the value exchange is fair because it sends valuable traffic to news sites. In a Spring 2025 experiment, Google removed European news content for a small percentage of users and, according to a company blog post, found it had “no measurable influence on the advertising revenues.”
The Real-World Impact of AI Search
While Google maintains that news content has minimal direct financial impact, publishers are reporting tangible and worrying declines in traffic. A recent analysis by PressGazette found that top news sites saw an average 12% drop in Google Search traffic in the month after AI Overviews were fully rolled out in the U.S.
The FehrAdvice study supports these concerns, finding that when journalistic content is absent, users perceive Google’s results as less complete, timely, and trustworthy. The research also suggests a long-term risk for Google, noting that users who experienced a search without news were less willing to use Google again and more likely to navigate directly to media websites. This indicates that while Google may not see a direct ad revenue link, the quality of its core product is at stake.
A Global War Over AI Training Data
The dispute in Germany is a microcosm of a larger, worldwide struggle over the value of content in the age of generative AI. Tech companies require massive datasets to train their models, and platforms with vast stores of human-generated content are increasingly walling off their gardens to demand payment. Reddit, for instance, has aggressively shifted its strategy from allowing open access to signing lucrative, exclusive data licensing deals.
Last year, Reddit began blocking most web crawlers while formalizing a $60 million partnership that grants Google special access to its content for AI training. This trend of litigation is accelerating. Eight major U.S. newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on June 11, 2025, for copyright infringement.
The suit calls AI training from copyrighted material as “one of the most brazen and massive thefts of intellectual property in modern history,” with Google, OpenAI and other AI labs using millions of articles for AI training without permission. This legal pressure reinforces the publishers’ argument that their professionally produced content holds significant, and compensable, monetary value.
Regulatory Scrutiny and the ‘Fair Value’ Debate
Governments are now stepping into the fray, attempting to legislate a “fair value” exchange between tech platforms and news publishers, with mixed results. In the U.S., the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA) is advancing through the state senate. The bill would compel platforms like Google to pay for news content, though Google has threatened to remove news links for California users if it passes.
Meanwhile, a review of Canada’s Online News Act, which led Google to pay C$100 million into a collective fund, shows the complexities of such arrangements. Many smaller Canadian publishers feel the distribution process is opaque and unfairly favors larger media corporations, raising questions about whether such legislation can truly support the diverse media ecosystem it aims to protect.
This global backdrop of legal battles and regulatory experiments provides critical context for the German publishers’ €1.3 billion demand. The FehrAdvice study is not just a financial claim; it is a strategic move to put a hard number on the value of journalism in the AI era, a value that touches on more than just “economic fairness, but also the future of journalistic diversity,” according to Professor Ernst Fehr, whose firm conducted the study. The outcome of this and similar disputes will likely shape the future of how news is created, consumed, and paid for on the internet.
Last Updated on June 16, 2025 7:55 pm CEST
