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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
CMA: Google search rankings unfair and opaque | Top 25 UK website owners ranked
Plus Wired to launch forum-style app as added subscriber benefit
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Good afternoon from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 17 June. Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Flip-Pay, the reader revenue platform, which has launched a fully integrated donations solution for publishers.
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🌍 Press Gazette’s latest ranking of UK website owners shows professional publishers being further squeezed by foreign-owned tech platforms.
Looking at the top 25 website publishers in the UK: 82% of audience minutes are spent with US-owned titles, 10% is with China-owned Tiktok and just 5% of time is spent with UK-owned websites. (The remaining audience share goes to Sweden-based Spotify.)
The big two, Meta and Alphabet, account for around two-thirds of all the time spent with the top 25 website publishers.
Tiktok is the fastest-growing UK online outlet and alone accounts for more audience minutes than every news publisher in the top 25 list combined.
Sky and the BBC largely rank thanks to their streaming video and audio services. All the other news publishers who make it into the top 25 (News UK, DMG Media, Reach and The Guardian) have lost monthly reach year on year.
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🔍 This data underlines the urgent need for better regulation of tech platforms which often abuse their dominant market status.
So it was welcome to see the UK Competition and Markets Authority launch another broadside against Google today, this time seeking a fairer shake for UK businesses when it comes to search results.
After telling Google to let publishers opt out of AI overviews (but not search) the CMA has now told the tech giant that search itself is unfair and opaque.
Google has been told to rank organic search results using objective and non-discriminatory criteria and be more transparent about how its rankings work.
Given the volatility that follows search algorithm updates I think there is a good chance that Google itself does not fully understand what is going inside the search black box, but we live in hope that it will better explain the rules by which so many businesses live or die.
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💬 Publishers are desperately seeking new direct ways to reach audiences independently of the tech platforms.
For Wired, this means trying to beat Reddit at its own game by launching its own forum-based app.