LY Corp. Plans to Increase Transparency on LINE, Yahoo News Licensing Fees

The Yomiuri Shimbun

16:36 JST, November 8, 2023

LY Corp. plans to increase transparency with respect to fees paid to news organizations for articles used on its sites.

At a financial results briefing held on Tuesday, LY President Takeshi Idezawa said, “We will explain more than ever before and increase transparency” regarding article usage fees paid to news media organizations.

LY, formed through the merger of LINE Corp., Yahoo Japan Corp. and other companies, receives articles from news organizations and pays them to use their stories on its news portal sites such as Yahoo Japan News.

In September, the Japan Fair Trade Commission released a report on the business practices of news distributors and said Yahoo Japan (now LY Corp.) “could be in a dominant bargaining position” over media organizations under the Antimonopoly Law.

The JFTC has urged news portal operators to disclose information about how the fees are calculated and other issues, saying news organizations are dissatisfied with the fees.

“We have started to discuss the issues [with news organizations],” Idezawa said.