
The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely - sornars
http://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-close-google-loophole-entirely/
======
ctrl_freak
If anyone's looking for another workaround, the article actually hints at the
solution: Facebook's l.php redirect that it uses when you click on a link
shared through the platform. It functions similarly to the Google redirect,
and you don't even need a Facebook account for it to work.

E.g.
[https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/article...](https://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/daniel-
tarullo-federal-reserve-regulatory-point-man-resigning-1486751401)

~~~
azag0
How come this isn't culturally perceived in the same way as not paying for
software or movies or music? I've read various reasons why people don't want
to pay. That's fine. But then simply don't read it.

~~~
rhaps0dy
> How come this isn't culturally perceived in the same way as not paying for
> software or movies or music?

Perhaps it is? I've almost never had anyone remark that I was doing something
bad when not paying for a software or movie or music.

~~~
kaspiCZ
Let's pretend you developed a piece of software you want to sell. People
download it without paying you. What do you do in that case?

~~~
kofejnik
it's a logical fallacy to assume that people who downloaded your work would
have discovered it and actually paid for it if there was no free option

a lot of artists would PAY to get millions of downloads/views

~~~
gaius
Let me know when you can pay rent or buy groceries with retweets.

~~~
vonklaus
it's unclear if you do not realize thousands of people make their living full-
time as promoters on social media. They _literally_ pay rent with money that
was paid to them proportionate to their retweets. Or if this was hyperbole to
underscore your disagreement with a freemium business model

~~~
abiox
this seems like an equivocation

------
tptacek
Tangent: I'm not sure I can think of recent money I've spent better than a
year-long Washington Post subscription.

Not because I want to support journalism (though I do), but because having a
whole newspaper to flip through every day is so much more productive and
efficient than getting dribs and drabs through Twitter and free news sites ---
many of which are ultimately sourcing through the journalism that
organizations like WaPo do anyways.

Realizing in retrospect how trifling the amount of money we're talking about
for a subscription is (it's a tiny fraction of my monthly information services
bill [cable/Internet, Netflix, &c]), I feel kind of embarrassed for not having
done this a long time ago.

I like WaPo but you might prefer something else, like NYT or WSJ. I'm sure all
the major papers are solid choices. Most of you are younger than me. Don't be
like me! Subscribe to a damn newspaper already.

~~~
CSMastermind
The Wall St. Journal is the single highest quality news source I'm aware of.

~~~
hedora
They dropped in quality sharply when Murdoch acquired them, and fired a big
chunk of the team. Then they started focusing on offensive conservative
propaganda on their editorial page. At that point I stopped reading or paying
attention to them.

Frankly, I welcome the news about the paywall since it will mean I see fewer
links to their "journalism".

Has something changed in the last few years? Did they somehow turn things
around?

[edit: Just wanted to point out that the events I'm referring to were about a
decade ago. Concretely, before the acquisition, it seemed like the WSJ was
driving something like 50% of the daily news cycle with a difficult to discern
bias.

Upper management intentionally destroyed that, at least from an outsider
perspective.

Reading the other comments and stories about the whole fake news phenomenon
makes me think no one has managed to replicate the function they used to
serve.]

~~~
tptacek
The WSJ editorial page was famously a conservative bastion long before Murdoch
bought them.

But this conversation is a rat-hole. We can generate 1000 comments about any
major newspaper. I think my point was just: pick one and subscribe to it.

------
downandout
The larger problem here is that unless they plan to have their Google search
results all say "click here to pay" or similar, this entire scheme violates
Google's cloaking policy and should result in their being deindexed. This has
traditionally been the entire reason that sites offered this workaround - it
wasn't out of the goodness of their hearts.

Here's hoping Google actually enforces their policy.

~~~
tomjen3
What I don't get is that they could just leave the first two paragraphs and
let every see that, then require you to subscribe for more - google would
accept that and they would still show up in search, right?

~~~
glenneroo
That's what Experts Exchange was doing. Back in the days before Stack
Overflow, EE was one of the hot places to go for answers to software
engineering problems. It was a free site for many years, then one day they
decided to require a subscription to read the answers. Google still indexed
the question, so that you would open up a EE link, only to be greeted with
"the answer requires a subscription". Google allowed that for a number of
years before finally deindexing their results, but it took bloody forever!

~~~
dawnerd
If I remember correctly EE had the real answers waaaaaay down on the page.
They were banking on people not scrolling.

~~~
pitay
From memory you could scroll to get the results IF it detected you clicked on
a google search result to get there, otherwise the answers were not displayed.

------
pascalxus
First of all, I think it's great that journalists can get compensated for
their work.

but, strictly speaking as a consumer, I must say their paywall is completely
out of touch with the way I want to pay for news consumption. I don't mind
paying 5c or even 10c per article, but I'm certainly not going to sign up to
pay 120$ for 6 months, if I'm only going to read 1 or 2 articles here and
there. but since they've done it this way, I can only conclude that most
consumers prefer it that way.

~~~
teej
The amount you want to pay for news is not anywhere close to the value it is
providing you or that they make from ad revenue.

~~~
sbierwagen
Let's say you're standing in a field strewn with gold bars. A man comes up to
you and offers to sell you a gold bar for $400,000. You point out that you are
standing among hundreds of gold bars, all of them free for the taking. He
points out that it was a lot of hard work extracting gold from thousands of
tons of ore, casting it, assaying it, etc.

Just because something cost a lot to make, doesn't mean it's worth a lot.
Sorry.

~~~
mertd
To be fair, we do not exactly have an oversupply of WSJ caliber journalism.

~~~
meesterdude
To also be fair, WSJ is hardly high caliber journalism, and since the sale to
Murdoch has degraded significantly in quality

~~~
0xC0DECAFE2020
And therin lies the situation. WSJ is worth very little to the very many. I
see it as just another editorialized website. Was it always that way? No.
Paper editions of the wall street journal were very good, on occasion. Web
editions in the new age of journalism, not even close. No where near worth
even trying to go around their paywall.

~~~
gm-conspiracy
The beginning of the end for me with the WSJ was when they changed the printed
size.

------
ikeboy
[https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en...](https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40543?hl=en&ref_topic=2481296)

According to this, it will need to mark WSJ links differently in Google News.

Interestingly, I tested it and links from Google news still had a "First Click
Free", contrary to OP. To test:

1\. Go to [https://news.google.com/](https://news.google.com/) from a computer
that hasn't visited any WSJ articles that day

2\. Click on a WSJ link (mine was [https://www.wsj.com/articles/daniel-
tarullo-federal-reserve-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/daniel-tarullo-
federal-reserve-regulatory-point-man-resigning-1486751401))

3\. See if the whole article is displayed. For me, it was, but when I tried
again it only showed a snippet. So it seems like they're only showing the very
first click, which does not comply with Google's guidelines above (which
require 3 articles a day to be viewable). Anyone else want to offer data
points?

Edit: oh, OP says it's only starting Monday.

(Of course, WSJ may be exempt because of direct communication with Google,
which I'd expect anyway at their size and at the fact that they weren't banned
when they started testing this. But Google should really note any exceptions
in their policy.)

~~~
ikeboy
Update: WSJ articles that are paywalled are now marked as subscription in
google news.

------
qwrusz
I see in the comments there are still some workarounds to this paywall. Good
to know. Cheers.

Just a reminder another workaround to the paywall is to you know actually
subscribe to the newspaper. That is an option they offer. Obviously not
possible for everyone. But if you have the money and want to read and support
journalism... WSJ is really far from perfect but it's not the worst newspaper
one could be subscribed to.

Also I think their discounted corporate plans program is huge, so depending
where you work you may get a discount or it could be free, never hurts to ask.

Also, maybe YC could negotiate some sort of group WSJ discount for Hacker News
users above a certain karma count? Just an idea...

~~~
nraynaud
I don't think it's smart to pay to read stuff from a group that also gets
money from advertisers. You're either the product or the customer, when in
doubt you'll be the product.

Real subscription journalism doesn't do advertising.

~~~
offa
What 'real subscription journalism' big-name newspapers that don't do
advertising can you name? I am honestly struggling to think of any.

~~~
nraynaud
Sorry, I'm French, so I can only cite you 2 French ones: Le Canard Enchainé
(100 yo, no website) and Mediapart (pure web).

We are talking serious news: the first one discovered that a minister had sent
1500 Jews in a train during WWII, the second one has discovered the minister
charged of tax collection had an undeclared bank account in Switzerland.

~~~
offa
Thank you for your reply. I can read a little bit of French, so Mediapart is
something I'll keep an eye on in the future.

------
lunchladydoris
Out of curiosity I searched for the Wall Street Journal subscription page. I
selected my country (UK) and then clicked on the subscription offer. I was
then taken to a Hong Kong page with no obvious way of changing it back to the
UK.

If they want subscribers, they're going to have to do a better job than that.

~~~
sumedh
I agree their pricing page is confusing. I just got information about a
discount offer but its not clear how much is the full price after the
discount.

~~~
manarth
It took me a couple times to find it. Go to
[https://buy.wsj.com/wsjuspresday17](https://buy.wsj.com/wsjuspresday17) and
click the "Act now" link.

$32.99 (plus tax) a month, for digital access.

------
sverige
The problem is that newspapers believe the myth that they were really
efficient at reporting on and delivering news, when really their core
competency was their ability to deliver print advertising to every doorstep in
a given market on a daily basis. This is similar to the music industry, whose
core competency was not developing talent or setting the standards of taste,
but rather delivering precisely molded disks of vinyl to far-flung stores
every Tuesday.

Oh internet, what myths do you believe about yourself? That you are the
harbinger of universal enlightenment and democracy?

------
raldi
Has any publisher tried out a paywall along the lines of the following?

"Hey, you've spent 29 hours so far this year reading 119 articles. Suggested
donation: $62"

~~~
pzh
The Guardian is doing something similar but without tracking the hours spent.
They just say "Hey, we see you spend a lot of time around here. Why don't you
help us out a bit so we can stay afloat?"

~~~
colanderman
The Guardian's tactic actually got me to pay for news for the first time in my
life. For some reason I'm really turned off to the idea of buying a ~$100
subscription to a single paper, but I'll gladly toss $25 here or there in
response to good journalism.

~~~
i_cant_speel
Wikipedia did the same thing for me. They request donations and I used it so
often that I felt like I had to.

------
CaliforniaKarl
Hmmmm. In the FAQ, under the question "Are paywalls ok?", there's this:

>It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

If this loophole is closed, will there be any workarounds? If that's the case,
then I wonder if it'll still be OK to post WSJ links to HN.

~~~
alfalfasprout
For what it's worth, whenever you share an article from the WSJ as a
subscriber it seems to generate a custom link that bypasses the paywall for
the recipient. I hope they retain this feature because I do enjoy sharing
articles with people that might not subscribe.

------
the_duke
Sadly for most newspapers, WSJ is in a special position. It has the highest
circulation of any paper in the US, and it has a target audience that really
doesn't mind paying.

A paywall wouldn't work out well for many others.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I suspect most of the others would be better just posting teaser material on
the web and trying to make the rest up in the paper edition.

~~~
briandear
The Houston Chronicle has a similar dual system. The print newspaper is online
but paywalled: houstonchronicle.com the "chron.com" version is mostly
buzzfeedish fluff that's free.

------
Animats
Paywalls have been tightening up recently. The Washington Post now has
stronger anti-ad-blocking. So do the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles
Times. The New York Times is still accessible.

It's a concern that the newspapers which have actual reporters in the field
are disappearing behind paywalls.

~~~
grzm
Actual reporters need to be paid :) The idea of free access to news is
relatively recent, since wide-spread web access. Prior to that, people paid
for subscriptions, or bought papers at new stands or from boxes. Sure, people
might share a few papers at the office or at a restaurant, but having access
like we've had for the past 20 years or so is pretty remarkable. I think it's
becoming increasingly clear that purely ad-based publishing is encouraging an
increase in yellow journalism.

~~~
jrs235
I was under the impression that the subscription fee for newspapers was to
cover printing and delivery. And that the ads were how the publishers got
paid.

~~~
ghaff
That's true. But it was a bundle that couldn't be separated at the end of the
day. So given print ad dollars to digital dimes the subscription fee needs to
cover web readership as well.

------
rspeer
So does this mean Google is going to stop indexing the text of WSJ articles?

~~~
robryan
Google should absolutely not index, at least not under the current organic and
news search. Why should they send traffic to articles that people can't freely
view?

I would support some kind of premium news offering from Google where they do
index these and you are allowed access through a revenue share subscription
made via Google.

~~~
chii
> Why should they send traffic to articles that people can't freely view?

what if WSJ paid google to index, but not give out for free? Or, rather,
partnered with google so that you can pay for WSJ (or individual articles) via
google's payment infrastructure?

------
arjie
The WSJ is a fantastic source of information. I no longer subscribe since I no
longer live in the US but I easily made more money from the information in the
paper than I paid in.

It was also very informative.

If you can't derive value from it, I understand all the trouble people go
through to bypass it. It's just that I see that people's stated aims and
revealed preferences are in contradiction. Everyone wants high quality news.
No one seems to want to pay what it costs.

------
bpchaps
So... is this good reason to stop posting WSJ on HN yet?

~~~
dang
It might be, if it happens.

------
jcoffland
I prefer Reuters. They seem to have less bias, their articles are free and
many stories at other news outlets are bought from Reuters anyway.

~~~
seanp2k2
There's also AP.org
[http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/fronts/RAW?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME](http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/fronts/RAW?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME)

Many news agencies are just editorializing AP news anyway.

~~~
aw3c2
When I realised that, I stopped considering the majority of "news
regurgitation" worth my money.

------
gesman
With every single news outlet taking polical position lately - it became
intolerable to read or find somewhat objective news source.

I don't mind paying <$10 / mo for clean no BS objective and detailed coverage.

~~~
mcintyre1994
Is WSJ not a political news source? They're owned by News Corp and at least in
the UK that conglomerate is responsible for the most politicised and
polarising media.

~~~
hnbroseph
yes, wsj is politicized.

------
jay_kyburz
I think this is great news. I'd love to see WSJ ad free and funded with
subscriptions.

I'm not sure I would subscribe, but I want to live in a world where it's
possible.

~~~
freehunter
I would love to see the NYT completely ad-free. I subscribed for a few months
thinking my subscription fee would remove the ads, but that wasn't the case.

I want a good source of news, ad-free, and I'm willing to pay for it.
Unfortunately it seems like I'm in the extreme minority.

~~~
grzm
I'd like that, too. However, subscriptions alone—unless raised
significantly—won't cover the costs for the NYT (or other paper). Note that
the physical paper always carries ads and each paper is paid for—either the
cover price or through a subscription.

Hopefully subscriptions _will_ encourage better quality ads, headlines, and
stories. Subscriptions do allow for less click bait.

~~~
harryjo
Financial Times has nearly no ads.

------
frakr
It's easier to not read Rupert Murdoch owned content.

------
soVeryTired
Another way to get around many paywalls is to change your browser's user agent
string to 'Googlebot'. I've got a subscription to the Financial Times, but if
there's a one-off article somewhere else that I want to read, that's my go-to
method for getting through a paywall. I wonder if their fix will close it off
too.

~~~
skissane
Google recommends using reverse DNS lookup to determine if a client claiming
to be Googlebot is really from Google –
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en)

It isn't hard for paywall website operators to use this to block Googlebot
fakers. (Rather than doing a reverse DNS lookup on every request, you'd want
to maintain a local cache of those results, so you only need to do DNS lookups
on new client IPs.)

I believe Cloudflare already does this, and possibly some other CDNs too.

~~~
dredmorbius
DNS lookups are expensive at server scale. Bot traffic ranges from maybe a
quarter to 80% of traffic, though googlebot was only a subset of that.

Cheaper to look for Google ASNs.

~~~
skissane
> DNS lookups are expensive at server scale.

Even if you use a distributed in-memory cache to store the DNS lookup results?
If User-Agent contains "Googlebot", then check for client IP in cache – if
cached as "Google" continue, if cached as "Not Google" display error page. If
client IP not in cache, do DNS lookup and then update cache – or, you could
even let the request continue if there is a cache miss, and do the DNS lookup
on another thread. That might let a Googlebot faker get a few requests
through, but they'll be blocked very quickly unless they keep on changing IPs
(something your average paywall bypasser will find hard.)

You don't need to consult the cache for every request, only for requests with
User-Agent contains "Googlebot". (And any other bots you are choosing to let
through your paywall, e.g. Bingbot.)

> Cheaper to look for Google ASNs.

How does one do that as an application developer? Do you need to speak to a
BGP server?

~~~
dredmorbius
A local caching DNS server should offer high-speed response. You could build
out a tier if necessary. High-capacity, high-speed DNS is not a greenfield.

The genuine Google requests will typically be cached quickly, and given HTTP
codes, you could give a nonpermanent error whilst you're adding new entries,
so there's that.

The problem is your misses may come from all over. So they're both expensive
and (potentially) large.

Even if Googlebot is only a fraction of requests, it's a _large_ fraction, and
I've not investigated how many of same are suspect.

For ASN, either the CIDR Report or Routeviews.org offer information. The
latter has downloadable tables, in CIDR format, for IP-based lookups. I've
long advocated that this be incorporated into routing hardware with reputation
data allowing for linespeed determination of traffic acceptability and rate-
limiting. Shifts toward VPN and Tor are making this slightly less useful than
previously, but it should still be a generally worthwhile option.

------
justin_vanw
They are 'striving' to hit 3M subscribers? Sounds like they are trying very
hard to go right out of business anyway.

------
user5994461
This article makes no sense.

The Google loophole only works half the time at best.

All articles posted on HN invariably end up with the same discussion:

1) "Behind a paywall. Can't read it."

2) "You need to use the google link"

3) "The google link also gives a paywall."

4) "It worked for me."

5) "Doesn't work for me."

~~~
Neliquat
If you cant just click on it, its paywalled. Idk why we put up with all this
bs for the so so rag that is the WSJ. I just downvote paywalls and move on.

~~~
hollerith
>I just downvote paywalls and move on.

I am confused. I always thought that on HN only comments can be downvoted.

Did you mean "flag paywalls and move on"?

------
desireco42
I welcome this move. It will stop their articles being posted here and in
other forums, we simply can't read them. While WSJ does have good content, I
will not pay for it and this will make sure it doesn't trick me into clicking
links and have to close browser.

On other hand, for their business to continue to grow, they need to come up
with way to show us that content somehow, maybe not the one they charge for
but something that can display excellence.

Good examples would be ArsTechnica and Nautilus.

------
golemotron
Something people don't appreciate about the culture wars: as left-facing
publications paywall, they yield ground to free right-facing ones.

------
msimpson
So the best offer the WSJ can provide is "All Access Digital" for $198 over 12
months, after which the price is doubled to $396 for the same length of time.
That means, eventually, you'll be spending about $33 a month just to read what
are mostly AP stories without even the guarantee of an ad-free experience.

How is this attractive?

------
thomasthomas
This is why google needs to get into social search. WSJ is basically moving
discovery from traditional search to social search. how many searches across
social platforms is google completely missing out on? I know for certain
topics, i run to twitter to search as opposed to google. buy google already

------
perlpimp
I am just wondering if sites can have affiliated material subscriptions like
with hn have free clickthrough for 2$ a month or 5$ a month to all sites from
where the articles originate from.

------
BuffaloBagel
My pain at the loss of the Google loophole is tempered by the realization that
the WSJ has largely become a propaganda organ of the GOP.

~~~
briandear
Luckily every other major newspaper has you covered then.

~~~
hnbroseph
most of them smeared sanders and fawned over clinton, so that's not a
guarantee.

------
iamgopal
I would pay if I don't fear them. They constantly trying to push a propogenda,
and you have to pay for it is indigestible

------
dforrestwilson
I have found that the best way to get past editorial bias is to aggregate
using Realclearpolitics.com

------
hnbroseph
after this election i'm even less interested in any newspaper subscriptions
than i was before.

they're all biased liars, or at least run stories buy such authors.

------
dredmorbius
Archive.is is another frequently viable workaround.

------
wcummings
>The Journal is a rarity in publishing in that it gets more money from readers
than advertising

This is probably a good indicator of quality.

~~~
mattraibert
It's true that it indicates quality, but I suspect it also indicates the
exceptional wealth of WSJ's readership.

------
gnu8
Fuck the Journal then. Above everything else, I will never reward their bad
behavior by paying them money.

