Brazilian newspapers see only a 5% drop after dropping out of Google News

What if Google had to start paying for each link that shows up when you do a search? It would totally wreck the company's business model, right? And maybe change the nature of search engines too?

An insurrection may be coming, and it is starting with Google News. Here's the timeline. A couple of weeks ago, a group of 154 Brazilian news websites comprising 90% of the country's market share made a pact to jump out of Google News. The websites, which are part of Brazil's National Association of Newspapers (ANJ), had been negotiating with the search engine. They wanted it to pay a fee for linking to their content.

Google execs said the plan could only backfire and hurt those websites by wrecking their traffic, but ANJ responded that the website is "irrelevant" and announced that its members had agreed to ban the site, which they then (really!) proceeded to do. (The press release, in Portuguese, is here.) Now ANJ is reporting that its members have only seen a 5% drop in traffic since the embargo.