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Refugees welcome – Spiegel.de and tagesschau.de are leading the Google News Boxes in Germany

Over the past few days, a few thousand refugees came to many German cities by train from Austria and Hungary. At the main stations of Munich or Dortmund, for example, hundreds of people gathered in order to welcome the refugees with applause. The willingness to help is huge – many brought clothes, toys and groceries. Furthermore, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced to provide more money for the refugees’ support. The matter of refugees with all its challenges, but also the welcoming culture has been important topics in the german media over the past weeks. We have put together a set of keywords for this matter and analysed, which news publishers with which keywords were present in Google News Boxes particularly often between 1 August and 8 September.

The two keywords that got most of the rankings in the Google News Boxes were the german aquivalents to “refugees” and “aid to refugees” (with 9327 rankings each of all news publishers together). Especially the publishers n-tv.de (1060), Spiegel.de and tagesschau.de (982 each) ranked often to the keyword “aid to refugees” in a Google News Box. For the more general keyword “refugees”, Spiegel.de (2526), zeit.de (1305) and focus.de (1271) covered most of the rankings in a News Box with their articles.

Spiegel has a over sixteen percent share of Google News Boxes for the refugee related keywords

Share of Google News Boxes keyword set refugees in Germany from 1st August till  7th Sept.

Looking at the summary of rankings for the complete set of keywords (see chart above), we see Spiegel.de ahead by far, followed by tagesschau.de, focus.de and zeit.de. This set of top players differs from the usual set in the monthly analyses. Tagesschau.de is very prominent in this case. Usually, Tagesschau gets a visibility of 4 to 5 percent in the News Boxes. But obviously, Tagesschau’s coverage of the matter of refugees is able to score at Google. The leader is Spiegel.de though, with a share of 16,75 percent in the News Boxes – and this is very clearly ahead of all the other news publishers. However, SPON does not reach their usual levels, which are mostly between 20 and 30 percent (see following chart). Nevertheless, Spiegel.de leads the field compared to the direct competitors for this range of topics as well.

Normally Spiegel and Focus reach visibility levels around 20 percent

Visibility Google News Boxes alle Topics, 1st August till 7th Sept.

In this keyword cluster, focus.de and bild.de stay below the levels, that they usually reach when it comes to visibility in the Google News Boxes. Focus.de, for example, is usually second behind SPON with results between 18 and 20 percent. For the present set of keywords, Focus “only” reaches 7,91 percent.

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