Brasilia – Newspapers accounting for 90% of the circulation in Brazil abandoned Google News.
Brazil’s National Association of Newspapers said all 154 members had followed its recommendation to ban the search engine aggregator from using their content.
The papers said Google News refused to pay for content and was driving traffic away from their websites, BBC reported.
Google said previously that the service boosted traffic to news websites.
“Staying with Google News was not helping us grow our digital audiences, on the contrary,” said the Association’s President, Carlos Fernando Lindenberg Neto.
“By providing the first few lines of our stories to Internet users, the service reduces the chances that they will look at the entire story in our websites,” he said, in an interview with the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
At a recent meeting of the American Press Association in Sao Paulo, Google defended its decision not to pay for the headlines from news websites.
“Google News channels a billion clicks to news sites around the world,” said Google’s Public Policy Director, Marcel Leonardi.
Brazil’s newspaper association said that, despite leaving Google News, many of the news organizations’ internet portals will still be listed by the aggregator.
Internet users using Google – but not Google News – will still be able to find content from most newspapers’ sites.