Google is conducting a “test” that will omit results from EU-based news publishers. The company says the time-limited trial will only affect a small portion of users in nine EU countries and will help “assess how results from EU news publishers impact the search experience for our users and traffic to publishers.” But given the fragile state of the news media — and the company’s history of threatening to pull its services in the face of news-related regulations — it’s tempting to view it as the equivalent of a mob boss conducting a “little test” to see how the corner laundromat fares without its protection.

Google describes the experiment (via The Verge) as a “small, time-limited test” to omit EU results from search, Google News and the personalized Discover feed. It will only affect one percent of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Those users will still see results from other websites, including non-EU news publications.

The company says news results will reappear as usual once the test concludes. (It didn’t list a specific timeframe.) Google stresses that the experiment won’t impact the publisher payments it makes under the European Copyright Directive (EUCD), under which the company has inked deals with over 4,000 EU publishers.

Google does have a history of using the potential withdrawal of its visibility as a negotiating stick in similar situations. In some cases, the tactic has helped it draw concessions.

Last year, Google pulled its news links from Canada in response to Bill C-18 (the Online News Act), which required tech companies to negotiate compensation with online publishers for linked content. After months of negotiations, Google said Canada had addressed its concerns and given it a path to an exemption. Canada said it granted one to Google last month, with the company agreeing to pay $100 million annually to news organizations.

In April of this year, Google briefly removed links to California news outlets in response to the proposed California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), which would require Google to pay news publishers in exchange for continuing to link to their websites. Although the bill’s fate is still up in the air, Google struck a deal with state lawmakers this summer, committing tens of millions of dollars to a fund supporting local news.

In 2021, the company threatened to remove its entire search engine from Australia in response to a then-proposed law requiring tech companies to share royalties with news publishers. The nation’s then-Prime Minister stood firm. “Let me be clear. Australia makes our rules for things you can do in Australia,” Scott Morrison said. After the bill was passed and enacted, Google struck deals with Australian media companies to license content.

Google says it hopes the data analysis tools it provides publishers will help them use the EU test to “understand traffic patterns.”

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer speaking with Bloomberg revealed Xbox is still open to acquiring more publishers and developers.

"We definitely want to be in the market, and when we can find teams and technology and capability that add to what we're trying to do in gaming at Microsoft, absolutely we will keep our heads up," said Spencer.

Spencer added no deals were "imminent" and any that might happen won't be on the scale of Activision Blizzard.

China is a potential area for acquisitions, according to Spencer. 

"It’s been a good area for us to learn from creative teams that have real unique capability," he said. "The real opportunity is to partner with creative teams in China for global."

Xbox in recent years has acquired Activision Blizzard, Bethesda parent company ZeniMax, and over a dozen other studios.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

Full Article - https://www.vgchartz.com/article/463054/xbox-is-still-open-to-acquiring-more-publishers-and-developers/

Called "The Black Pope" by many of his followers, Anton La Vey began the road to High Priesthood of the (lurch of Satan when he was only 16 years old and an organ player in a carnival: ... From that time early in his life his path was clear. Finally, on the last night of April, 1966 -- Walpurgisnacht, the most important festival of the believers in witchcraft -- LaVey shaved his head in the tradition of Ancient executioners and announced the formation of The Church Of Satan. He had seen the need for a church that would recapture man's body and his carnal desires as objects of celebration.

As Lighthouse Trails Publishing (the publishing arm of Lighthouse Trails Research Project) soon nears the end of our 10th year (10 years this coming March), we'd like to take a moment to ponder 2011, which was a busy year for us. It's not easy being a small publisher in today's western society where book reading is being slowly squeezed out of many people's lives by the Internet, television, radio, and a host of other technological inventions. Not only that, small publishing houses must compete with the large houses that seem to have marketing budgets that keep them selling thousands, if not millions, of books. And many of the more established Christian publishers have been bought out by huge secular corporations giving their marketing budgets even more clout. An article in Christianity Today this past fall titled "HarperCollins Buys Thomas Nelson, Will Control 50% of Christian Publishing Market" is a case in point. HarperCollins bought Zondervan in 1988. Thomas Nelson and Zondervan are Christian publishing's two largest publishing house. -- But in spite of the huge challenge it is for small publishers to stay in business, Lighthouse Trails is still here after nearly a decade. We believe that God has continued to provide for us; and we thank Him for giving us the wisdom to keep our overhead small, live and work as simply and frugally as we can, and never lower our standards from what we believe they should be just so we can sell more books. We'll never be a Thomas Nelson or Zondervan (we think that might be a good thing considering their move toward contemplative and emerging), but we hope and pray we can be around another ten years and represent even more authors than we already have who have biblical and personal integrity.

Given the IAB and PwC’s projection that ad revenue in podcasting will at last pass $1 billion in 2021 (up from $479 million in 2018), one would think this mediums decade-long slow (really slow) march towards some sort of critical mass has finally hit its stride. Let the gold rush begin, no?

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According to Matt Cutts, there are over 100 factors that affect search engine ranking. For those of you who don't know, Matt is a Google guy guru, he is employed by Google but writes an independent blog and shares information related to Google and search engine optimization. Unfortunately, of those 100 items that account for search engine ranking, there are only a few that webmasters can actually control.

Tips for Webmasters and Publishers

The Met Gala once again took over NYC - and our social feeds. This year’s theme, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty”, paid homage to one of fashion’s greatest designers on one of fashion’s biggest nights.

the appeals court ruled that, despite being a nonprofit and no evidence of market harm, its implementation of Controlled Digital Lending isn't fair use #

SENSEI CODE enables online publishers to save, organize, and share content creations while exploring a vast collection of publicly shared images for business. Additionally, all images created using SENSEI CODE are commercially usable.

A Poignant Exploration of Youth and Self-Discovery Through Poetry

A Riveting Tale of Honor, Mystery, and the Untamed Spirit of the Comanche

Toronto, ON – A book on disruption and innovation by a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management has received a 2017 PROSE Award for Excellence award. The Disruption Dilemma by Prof. Joshua Gans won in the ‘Business, Finance & Management’ category. The PROSE Awards recognize excellence in publishing, and are sponsored […]

The media industry today may not have a very favorable view of AI — a technology that’s already been used to replace reporters with AI-written copy, while other AI companies have scooped up journalists’ work to feed their chatbots’ data demands, but without returning traffic to the publisher as search engines once did. However, one […]

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Members of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) are seeking over $250 million in damages for alleged infringement of nearly 1,700 copyrights.

A revised version of the bill was tabled by bipartisan senators in the United States on Wednesday that strengthens the stance for digital news publishers to negotiate with Big Tech companies for sharing revenues that entail the use of their content.

Have you been writing and submitting your free reprint articles for quite sometime now? If so, how is your reprint rate doing? Is it doing well or is it a bit below 50%? Are webmasters approving your articles?

How to uncover the most profitable 'back door keywords' for use in your adwords campaigns.

New Google Blog Search is Great Marketing News for Business Podcasts, Blogs and RSS Feed Publishers. See how your business website can get more traffic with a quality Blog or Podcast today.

The Online Publishers LLC has announced its new digital marketing platform "TOP Platform" which offers a variety of digital solutions.

This year's conference will continue to focus and build on the challenges and hurdles that companies working in the microbiome industry will have to recognize and navigate in order to successfully commercialize their products.

Leading educational research firm announces formation of a group dedicated to providing independent, third-party, reviews of research studies

Unlike other solutions, AuthorONE delivers explainable, actionable results.

Check with The Online Publishers "TOP platform" first when you need digital marketing solutions and services because it will help you to save both time and money, while also providing you the best options.

inboxAds Gives Publishers 10% Bonus Revenue in Their Fight Against COVID-19, Says Company CEO

The COVID-19 Research Pass (CPR) program provides direct access to more than 26 million articles

PODTRAC has released its APRIL 2019 ranking of the top podcast publishers, with iHEARTRADIO topping the list, trading places with the usual leader, NPR. All of the top 20 saw audience … more

Copier Jam is a new exhibition at the Childers Art Space. It brings the underground world of self-published zines out of the bedroom and into the light.

I know from talking to many of my clients that most have read Jim Collins’ book ‘Good to Great’. I have also been inspired by his research into what makes great companies great. Many of you will recall an article …

Dan Greenberg, co-founder and CEO of native advertising solutions provider Sharethrough, discusses how buyers’ increased desire for contextual targeting and native advertising will benefit premium publishers in 2018.

Open Books Publishers is a social enterprise run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. They publish monographs and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences and offer them on open access.

Social networks are calling themselves platforms rather than publishers to skirt around legal issues, and it has to stop.

Online publishers often lack the knowledge and familiarity to leverage online tools to monetise content

On March 13, 2020, the National Science and Technology Advisors from a dozen countries, including the United States, called on publishers to voluntarily agree to make their COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications and associated data immediately accessible in PubMed Central (PMC) and other appropriate public repositories to support the ongoing public health emergency response efforts.

For more information on which publishers have responded to this call and how to discover COVID-19 and coronavirus-related publications in PMC, see the main COVID-19 Initiative page.

A FAQ is also available. If you have questions not addressed in the FAQ, please contact pmc-phe@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.

You can learn more about how this initiative fits into the wider NLM response to the current public health emergency in Dr. Patti Brennan's post, "How Does a Library Respond to a Global Crisis?"

If the pandemic lasts another three months, news brands could suffer a £50 million loss

The list comes after Collins Dictionary named Brexit its word of the year for 2016. A Collins language consultant said that Brexit had been 'quite generous in its gifts to the English language'.

Apple recently sent a mass email to news publishers to introduce them to Apple News, an upcoming Flipboard-inspired app for iOS 9 that will deliver curated news and magazine stories with custom layouts, photo galleries, videos and animations optimized for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

The email has ignited some controversy in the news and blogging community over the past week, according to the BBC, which reports that some writers are disappointed about Apples decision to automatically include a websites RSS feeds in Apple News unless they specifically opt out by replying to the email.

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Even though legal publishers, both law firms and traditional media, put a lot of time and effort into publishing, their publishing platforms are often outdated, deficient or broken. Worst of all, the publishers have no idea.

Like many people I use Feedly, a news aggregator, to stay abreast of news, information, developments and commentary. Others use Manzama, Zama, Flipboard or corporate-installed news aggregators. I liberally share what I read directly from Feedly to Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook and LinkedIn.

Social sharing like this is how news moves today, lots of people read and share. We call it social media.

Most of the items shared are shared by a select group within particular industries. They are called the influencers.

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Facebook began testing a  breaking news label for developing stories back in November, and now the social network is expanding the option to more publishers. Starting this week, the company says 50 more outlets in North America, Latin America, Europe and Australia will be privy to the tag. That is in addition to the small group of local and national publishers that are already using it. If all goes well, Facebook said it may offer the option to even more publishers in the future.

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Editors in Europe and the US plan to work with authors whose lives and labs have been disrupted by the novel coronavirus

The Association of Publishers in India has written to commerce minister Piyush Goyal seeking the inclusion of books in the list of essential goods that consumers should be allowed during the current lockdown at least via online retailing.