Booked in Dublin: Where Google’s European Money Shows Up, and Where It Doesn’t

Google Ireland Limited reported €86.6bn in turnover in 2024, yet the Google companies that news publishers can inspect in their own countries say little about the advertising markets they share. That gap is the subject of Booked in Dublin: Google’s European Finances in 2024, published by the Media and Journalism Research Center (MJRC) in its Global Media Finances Map (GMFM) series. Written by Marius Dragomir, the study draws on company registries and audited accounts for 36 Google companies in 21 European countries.

The Dublin company, which signs advertising contracts with customers across European markets, grew its turnover by 12.1% and made a profit after tax of almost €4bn. The main Google companies in 20 other European countries reported €8.16bn combined. Most of these national companies do not sell advertising on their own account: other Google companies pay them their costs plus a margin for marketing, sales support and research. Their revenue is largely a fee rather than a measure of what local advertisers spend. Excluding Italy, where an accounting change makes the figures incomparable, their combined revenue grew 4.8%, against 12.1% in Dublin.

The fastest growth came from Google’s European infrastructure. Five data-centre operators raised their combined revenue by 44.2%, to €1.88bn, and the cloud sales companies by 21.3%, with much of this billed within the group. Italy shows the gap between the accounts and the market: Google Italy reported net revenue of €162.3m under a new accounting standard, against gross revenue of €815.2m, while the regulator AGCOM puts the country’s online advertising market at €8.42bn in 2025.

For journalism, the study identifies five signals: Google’s own properties are growing faster than its publisher network; the referral bargain between search and news is breaking; Google’s test of the value of news to its ads leaves the bigger question open; AI rights are becoming a new bargaining question; and regulators are moving, but slowly.

The study also considers the EU’s new public country-by-country reporting rules, which will show where Google operates, books profit and pays tax, but not necessarily what advertisers in each country paid. “That still leaves the three numbers journalism needs most: for each country, what advertisers paid Google, what Google paid publishers and other partners, and what it kept,” Dragomir writes.

The full study can be read and downloaded as a PDF on the Global Media Finances Map website.

Photo by Abhishek Navlakha