Washington:  Google made $4.7 billion from its Search and Google News in 2018. According to a report in The New York Times, the news industry in the US made an estimated $5.1 billion from digital advertising.

The report took the data from the News Media Alliance which represents more than 2,000 newspapers across the US.

“The journalists who create that content deserve a cut of that $4.7 billion. They make money off this arrangement and there needs to be a better outcome for news publishers,” David Chavern, President and chief executive of the alliance said.

The alliance said, “as it does not include the value of personal data that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, gathers when users click on news articles”.

According to Chavern, an outcome of any conversation generated by the study would be the passage of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.

Google was yet to comment on the study findings.

Nearly 40% of the clicks on Google’s trending queries today are for news, which the tech giant does not produce itself.

Google and Facebook control the distribution of news and 80% of external traffic is routed through these two companies to various news websites.

According to the New York Magazine, one in five local papers in the US has closed since 2004 and from 2008 to 2017, newsroom employment declined by 23%, representing nearly 27,000 jobs. (Agencies)