Press publishers spend billions on producing quality journalism each year. While the costs of producing well supported, quality journalism manifest in producing the original content, i.e. the very first copy, further costs – due to digitization – are negligible. Parallel to this, prosperous business models thrive on re-using articles in press publications, as well as optimizing them for search and social media platforms attractive enough to generate huge amounts of advertising revenue. But not for the those who actually make the content. The European Union seeks to persuade large digital companies to take part in the financing of European content, mainly through competition law or by taking steps to improve the competitive position of European companies. The rules relating to press publishers of the EU Copyright Directive of 2019 intend to serve this purpose and will be analysed in this paper.