

Google to limit free access to news sites - ajg1977
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8389896.stm

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blahedo
Not clear from this article: are they really trying to charge/register to
click a link to content that would have been provided for free if it had been
linked from somewhere else? Doesn't that just defer their problem? Doesn't
that mean there will just be other, more small-scale news aggregators and/or
blogs that will serve as intermediaries?

~~~
qeorge
I don't think the end user will see a lot of change here, as its a pretty
nuanced change. "First Click Free" is actually more of an indexing policy than
anything else.

Since its an obscure topic, and the BBC article is fairly misleading, here's a
little background on what "First Click Free" is all about:

Basically, showing a different page to Googlebot than you show to users (i.e.,
"cloaking") will get your site delisted. This puts sites like NYTimes.com in a
weird spot. They want to force users to register before viewing any articles,
but they also want Google to index these same articles (and a forced
registration would prevent that). Google wants the same thing (to index the
pages), but seeks to avoid special exceptions in its algorithm (e.g.,
maintaining a whitelist of sites who are allowed to cloak).

In an effort to resolve this problem, "first click free" (FCF) was born.

In essence, FCF means that you show the user the first article without
requiring registration, but once they click through to a second article, you
can force them to register without running afoul of Google's no-cloaking
policy. AFAIK, its not a program you have to opt-into with Google, you just
implement it on your site however you like.

The problem is that every click that originates from news.google.com is
counted as a "first click", even though it could be the 15th article they've
viewed on nytimes.com. So clicking through from Google News becomes a hack to
avoid registering for nytimes.com (or wsj.com, etc).

So basically, it looks like Google is relaxing the rules a bit, and saying you
can ask for registration even if the click comes directly from Google News,
provided the user has already viewed >= 4 articles on your site.

tl;dr: this a fairly minor policy shift, as I read it.

~~~
skalpelis
> They want to force users to register before viewing any articles, but they
> also want Google to index these same articles (and a forced registration
> would prevent that). Google wants the same thing (to index the pages), but
> seeks to avoid special exceptions in its algorithm (e.g., maintaining a
> whitelist of sites who are allowed to cloak).

Even if the cloaked-paywall-articles get indexed, couldn't that same fact -
that they are behind a paywall and not easily accessible - be interpreted that
they offer lower quality search results and thus should be listed further down
the organic search result list?

~~~
qeorge
Certainly, but unless the Google searcher can access the content behind the
paywall without registration the website is not following the First Click Free
rules. If they cloak to Googlebot and don't follow FCF they'll be delisted,
because as you said inaccessible content is by definition low-quality (in this
case).

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theprodigy
"Some readers have discovered they can avoid paying subscription fees to
newspaper websites by calling up their pages via Google."

I actually cancelled my wsj online subscription because i would would just
type their headlines into a google news search and find free stories of the
same topic. I actually told the customer service lady that when she asked why
I was canceling.

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dhimes
I guess the ad revenue model isn't working for them online. I figured if it
was going to work for anybody they would figure out how it would work for
them. I mean, I thought that was a large part of their revenue model in the
hard-copy word anyway. My paper has a heckuva lot of ads.

~~~
eli
At least with a print paper you were reasonably certain the ads were reaching
people in a certain geographical location (and you could data mine your
subscriber list for more stats).

With an online site -- especially one with no registration required -- you
know very little about the people reading, so advertisers only pay commodity
rates for ads that could apply to just about anyone (whiten your teeth,
refinance your mortgage, etc). Advertisers are still very willing to pay to
reach potential customers, but newspapers in the online world haven't really
figured out a way to connect to them.

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cmars232
What if I don't store cookies? Or I delete them regularly? Or a Firefox
extension does this for me?

~~~
nfnaaron
Well that would be stealing, the same as if you walked out of the room during
a commercial.

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thras
Couldn't newspapers do this before? I don't see why Google needs to be
involved so that a newspaper can show a registration page when a user goes to
their article (from Google) more than 5 times. They could implement this with
or without Google.

~~~
duskwuff
See qeorge's comment above - basically, what this really is is a change in
Google's cloaking policy for news sites.

