The article doesn't seems to be worth to be published in NY Times. The $4.7B was computed based on how much the Google's revenues increased since 2008 when Google News was bringing in $100M per year. Oh, how accurate this study must be....
I also don't understand where Google is supposedly making huge revenue on news. Is it solely ads in Google Search? Anecdotally, I just queried for a few different subjects that are in the news today, and there were zero ads in the results.
Not to mention how much they push AMP and they whitelist which ad networks are allowed to serve ads on AMP [0]
It's very naive to think Google doesn't profit from the News industry.
[0]: https://amp.dev/it/documentation/components/amp-ad?format=we...
One can only hope that AMP will be the court case of the digital century. Whether Google's obscenely obvious anti-competitive projects are allowed to flourish or wither will have a major impact in the development of the World Wide Web going forward.
Added to that the permanent threat of SEO de-ranking (as the Daily Mail complained about recently), the relationship between publishers and Google is fragile.
I'd imagine that they're ignoring the DoubleClick ad revenue because it's doesn't generate a click bait headline. Google pays no-name publishers 68% of the ad-revenue they get, so I'd imagine for a name brands like NYT news sites capturing a much larger share from the Google ads on their properties.