Nine European press agencies want to make Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major players pay for the millions of news articles they use or link to. “Facebook has become the biggest media in the world,” the agencies said in a plea published in the French daily Le Monde. “Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom.”



News is the second reason after catching up on family and friends for people to log onto Facebook, which tripled its profits to $8.5 billion last year, yet it is the giants of the net who are reaping vast profits “from other people’s work” by soaking up between 60 and 70 percent of advertising revenue, with Google’s jumping by a fifth in a year. Meanwhile, ad revenue for news media fell nine percent in France alone last year, “a disaster for the industry.”

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Net Giants “Must Pay for News” from Which They Make Billions