They never wanted Google to show displaying snippets, as we will shortly see when the French publishers notice the plummeting page views and issue "emergency snippet licenses" to Google in order to save themselves from their own greed.
Previous discussion on this had a link to the research paper that actually measured said "plummeting" in case of Spain - the decrease in traffic was well under 20%. Just FYI.
* Edited for clarity.
If a stock drops 10% in a day, that's gigantic. Considering how precarious the profitability of news organizations can be to begin with, a 10% drop that can't be reversed could be the difference between staying in business and folding, depending on how costs are structured.
If your traffic decreases by, say 10%, that's huge -- that's a plummet. (If your traffic decreases by 80%, you don't need adjectives anymore -- you're probably out of business now.)