Google blinks in Murdoch “paywall” row
Rupert Murdoch’s threat to pull News Corporation content from Google completely appears to have had some effect. The search giant has now decided it will limit users to seeing five pages a day from some paid content sites.
The row involved Google’s ‘First Click Free’ policy, which meant that participating Web sites set their system up so that although their site was officially restricted to users who had paid a subscription, people following a link from either Google or Google News could read the page with the story in question (they just couldn’t go on to follow any of the links within the site itself).
While that is obviously a deterrent to anyone who felt the need to read an entire online newspaper, it has a pretty clear flaw: as links to most stories can be found at Google News, there’s nothing to stop users simply following multiple links from Google to read as many of the “protected” pages as they like. In the eyes of publishers such as Murdoch, that runs the risk of making paid subscriptions seem pointless.
Google has now announced that publishers which take part in First Click Free can limit users to seeing five pages a day through Google links. The site says it’s up to site owners how they count the visits, which suggests some of the obvious workarounds (switching browser, deleting cookies, using a proxy server) may have varied results.
The search site has also told publishers they are welcome to submit preview pages – those which contain the introduction to a piece and then a request for a subscription to read the rest – for indexing on Google and Google News. However, they do hint that it’s likely such pages will not rank highly on the index, mainly because other sites won’t link to them as often as with full articles.
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December 2nd, 2009
I don’t see this as a Google “blink” at all. This is a smart move by Google! When Murdoch sees how much less traffic is being driven to his sites via Google, he’ll think twice about his plan to pull Google completely. When his ad impressions revenues drop through the floor he’ll see the light.
February 7th, 2011
Fantastic site, where did you come up with the info in this summary? I’m happy I found it though, ill be checking back soon to see what other articles you have.