Google To Invest $300 To Fight Fake News And Make Paywalls Better

Google is planning to attack several issues at once with a new initiative that it just launched. Costing $300 million, it’s intended to help journalists do their jobs better, curb the spread of fake news, and give publications a hand with regards to subscriptions. The whole thing is one giant orchestrated event to make sure that real journalism endures in the internet age.

As Google notes in its announcement post, the majority of the world’s internet users have chosen the search engine as their go-to source of trusted information. This usually means featuring high-quality content from actual journalists, and yet publications struggle with trying to survive in the digital age. With several new sub-initiatives under one giant umbrella project, the company hopes to address this.

“We’re excited to launch Subscribe with Google, a way for people to easily subscribe to various news outlets, helping publishers engage readers across Google and the web. Our goal with Subscribe with Google is to ease the subscription process to get more readers consuming publishers’ journalism, as quickly as possible,” the post reads.

As Gizmodo points out, it has never been a secret that ad revenue is no longer as robust as it has been in the past, at least for entities other than Facebook and Google. In order to stave off getting shut down, even major publications such as The New York Times and The Atlantic have been forced to use drastic measures.

These include installing paywalls, which basically require readers to pay a subscription fee after consuming a certain amount of free content allotted for the month. Other publications have chosen to hide specific content behind a paywall, especially those that offer exclusive details.

For the most part, this isn’t that different compared to when people still subscribed to a newspaper to be delivered to their doorstep. Google simply wants to broaden the scope so that all real news publications benefit.