The Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers and Google have signed a collaboration agreement which provides for the recognition of the importance of copyright and the enhancement of editorial content. The basic three-year investment by Google is 12 million euros but on balance the benefits would be in the order of about 40 million euros in the third year, said Maurizio Costa, president of Fieg.
Among the key points of the agreement:
1) a revenue sharing mechanism generated by the Google Play Newsstand mobile app;
2) the possibility for publishers to host and distribute their video content on their own sites and on YouTube (the video viewed on their own sites is completely monetised by the publishers, for other videos there is a revenue sharing mechanism);
3) favorable conditions for the benefit of publishers for the use of Google Analytics and Optimize (in beta phase), complete with ad hoc training;
4) joint action to protect online content;
5) the creation of a Digital Lab.
"It is a framework agreement - declared the president of Fieg, Maurizio Costa - which allows our associates, interested in taking advantage of the conditions offered, to obtain significant advantages, for an overall value, estimated in the event of adhesion of a significant part of the Fieg publishers, of around 40 million euros in the third year”.
According to Carlo D'Asaro Biondo, president of Strategic relations EMEA at Google “today is a good day for innovation and collaboration. Innovation comes from collaboration and the strategic partnership between Google and Fieg demonstrates that when goals and values are shared, innovation comes as a result; innovation aimed at accelerating the digitization of Fieg publishers by making our skills and tools available to them”.
The Italian agreement comes after the agreement in France (60 million euros over three years for an ad hoc fund for digital publishing) however publicly judged insufficient by Italian publishers and the closure of Google News in Spain following the entry enforced online copyright law (contested by Google) which requires anyone who posts a link or short quote from a newspaper article to pay a "fair fee" to the publisher.
