Content creators get click throughs. And while I’m not sure if this is specific to me in the UK, news.google.co.uk has no ads.

Google News presents an aggregated view of online news. Because of Google’s reach, news.google gets a lot of page views and results in a lot of click-throughs to the actual publisher. Facebook is a similar source of traffic although that’s driven by social sharing. In both cases, publishers benefit a lot assuming they can monetise those page views.

I’m not a big fan of Google but Google News isn’t the “bad guy” here.