
WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Results - mudil
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-05/wsj-ends-google-users-free-ride-then-fades-in-search-results
======
leggomylibro
Makes sense from Google's point of view.

You are no longer providing value to our users. You will be quickly replaced
with something that provides more value to our users.

~~~
amelius
But what if you are the kind of person that _wants_ to pay for good
journalism? Will Google figure this out from your history, and rank WSJ
higher?

~~~
problems
Then go to that source, not to Google. If you go to Google, expect to find
content that provides Google users value.

~~~
saurik
As a Google user, I value it because it finds things. Some of those things
cost me money. To make this visceral: what differentiates Google finding me an
expensive camera that I can buy from B&H that matches my search criteria and
helps me get my work done of Google finding me an expensive article from the
Wall Street Journal that matches my search criteria and helps me get my work
done? If Google wants to optimize for "lowest price" then it should make that
a _non-default_ criterion as otherwise they are just helping me find cheap,
low quality crap: if that is providing you value you probably have a broken
definition of "value" :/.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
Comparing the economics of a pure bit-based product (media) with a pure atom-
based product (camera) is not the most convincing way to make an argument in
my opinion.

You can get most of what WSJ writes somewhere else for free. You'll probably
say that's not true because the value you get from WSJ is not news but their
commentary, but even in this case that particular "value" is very subjective
and for most people it's not valuable enough.

I for one don't care about whatever elite content they write. And I definitely
don't care for a mere website wasting my time by making me click through just
to find out I can't read it, over and over again.

~~~
SilasX
So, because your product is easy to copy, that makes it not valuable. A
rejection of the concept of IP with different words.

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
I don't know if you have heard of "strawman fallacy" but you and the other guy
below saying "So you believe that there is such thing as a news report without
commentary?" have fallen into that trap.

It's not even funny how you go from my argument to "This makes it not
valuable" to "A rejection of the concept of IP with different words".

Here, let me spell it out for you by copy and pasting the same comment:

> You can get most of what WSJ writes somewhere else for free. You'll probably
> say that's not true because the value you get from WSJ is not news but their
> commentary, but even in this case that particular "value" is very subjective
> and for most people it's not valuable enough.

\- It is fact that you can get most of what WSJ writes somewhere else for
free.

\- And I said the "value" is very subjective. and it's not "valuable enough"
for most people. Yet you go on and say I said "it's not valuable". Then
somehow go from that to accusing me of rejecting the concept of IP. I don't
even know where to start.

~~~
SilasX
The strawman fallacy is when you misattribute a position to someone.

"Strawman" not a catchall for "I don't see all the steps in your argument for
how my position X implied Y." I'd be glad to spell those out more explicitly.

>...It is fact that you can get most of what WSJ writes somewhere else for
free.

It is a fact _because people copy it_. Therefore, you're saying it's not
valuable because people can get it elsewhere because it was copied. So, the
copy-ability made it valueless, exactly as I inferred from your argument
(rather than misattributing it).

(late edit: Also, the fact that you insist on "atom-based" and "bit-based"
being incomparable doesn't help your case that you're not rejecting IP:
"Comparing the economics of a pure bit-based product (media) with a pure atom-
based product (camera)".)

Okay, perhaps that is not what you meant and therefore it was a strawman --
but that's the only self-consistent, plausible reading I saw.

The only other meaning is that,

"You can get all the interesting facts contained in this story from different
sources, without just copy-pasting."

Is that what you meant? If so, it's implausible on its face: why are people
trying to circumvent the paywall if they didn't want the WSJ's article
specifically? Why can't they just go somewhere else? Why do they load HN
discussion with complaints about a paywall rather than "here's the free,
independent version that's just as good"?

>And I said the "value" is very subjective. and it's not "valuable enough" for
most people. Yet you go on and say I said "it's not valuable". Then somehow go
from that to accusing me of rejecting the concept of IP. I don't even know
where to start.

I said that because you dismissed the value on the grounds of it being
"subjective", which was close enough in this context to saying "oh, I can't
quite put a hard value on it, so I don't have to care about this journalism
going away". As above, why don't people just find another non-copied source?
Because they _non_ -subjectively _do_ want to look at this specific source.

With that said, I do agree that it may not be _obvious_ how your position is
tantamount to rejecting IP. But I was deriving that as an implication, not
misattributing anything to you. Whether or not you recognize this position as
implicitly rejecting of all IP, there is certainly a clear logical chain for
how it has such an implication.

Edit: I know we're not supposed to talk about downvotes, could they at least
wait the 60 seconds necessary to read this?

~~~
pluma
> why are people trying to circumvent the paywall if they didn't want the
> WSJ's article specifically? Why can't they just go somewhere else? Why do
> they load HN discussion with complaints about a paywall rather than "here's
> the free, independent version that's just as good"?

Because people come to HN, click on a link, see it's paywalled and leave a
comment complaining about it, then move on to a different post. Most people
who complain about the paywall likely aren't invested enough in the headline
to find another source for the same information.

Personally I mostly skim HN for news. If an article is paywalled and isn't
profoundly interesting to me, I can spend the time it would cost me to look up
alternate sources for the same story just reading something else instead. I
don't read WSJ articles because they're better, I read them because they're
_there_. In fact, I actually prefer other news outlets.

You're misattributing motives to what boils down to mere laziness. And even in
doing that you don't actually have a case because many news stories have
alternative sources in the HN comments, especially when they're paywalled or
too superficial.

So, yes, you're misattributing motives, which is literally how you just
defined strawmen.

------
Androider
If you click a search result and end up seeing something completely different
than what you expected based on the search result snippet, it shouldn't matter
if you're the WSJ or a scam site trying to hack your Google rank. It's
deceiving the user and inflating your search ranking at the expense of more
deserving listings.

~~~
seanp2k2
This. I installed the personal blacklist extension for Chrome just to
blacklist Quora results because of this. I wish Google would actually punish
them more. I click through on something which looks relevant, and the result
is a useless login screen. LinkedIn is the same.

~~~
amelius
Pinterest too.

~~~
dawnerd
Google images feel like it's nothing but Pinterest now.

~~~
shostack
Frankly I'd love Google to turn Google Images into much more of a true
Pinterest competitor. Image search volume is pretty large, and they are
already testing monetizing it. Now they just need to add in features that let
you store and organize that information (and build a better profile of you in
the process while also crowdsourcing tagging).

Pinterest needs more competition.

~~~
jquery
> X needs more competition.

In the context of Google being the alternative, this is sad and funny at the
same time.

Hacker News in the abstract: The web needs more decentralization.

Hacker News IRL: Let Google own every vertical.

~~~
shostack
I certainly recognize the irony of suggesting that Google might help improve
competition.

That said, there aren't many players in a position to provide actual
competition to Pinterest like Google can. The obvious concern is where you
draw the line at anti-competitive if Google tried to do the equivalent of what
they did with Yelp ratings.

------
rory096
Note that the Twitter workaround still works:

[https://t.co/2t073JIAWe](https://t.co/2t073JIAWe)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/british-police-identify-
london-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/british-police-identify-london-
attackers-as-may-calls-for-crackdown-on-extremists-1496663010)

Just append site:twitter.com to your Google search, click through, and voila.

~~~
NelsonMinar
WSJ also still serves articles to folks coming from Facebook. There's a Chrome
extension to redirect all WSJ URLs through Facebook to bypass the paywall,
works for now.

~~~
faitswulff
I made a bookmarklet for it in chrome:

javascript:(()=>{window.location =
"[https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u="](https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=") \+
window.location})();

Clicking the bookmarklet when you're on a WSJ article will shunt the url
through Facebook's redirect service, which will allow you to view the article.

------
chollida1
Watching this very closely, I pay for a WSJ subscription because I think their
content is better than most, and also because I get sent alot of links to
their content. Something about this later point feels like the argument people
make about using Office because people still send them Excel and Word docs.

Similar to how software companies release free software to augment what makes
them money, Bloomberg is able to spend a lot of money on producing content
that is sponsored by their terminal subscriptions.

The WSJ might be in a unique situation where their primary audience will pay,
often due to companies footing the bill for employee's, so perhaps they can be
one of the few news producing companies that doesn't have to depend on Google
for traffic in that their primary audience loads up their front page multiple
times a day just to see what's there.

I wouldn't be surprised if they did a deal with Bloomberg to provide their
content on terminals to further strengthen their ties to their core audience.

~~~
Simulacra
That's a really good point. Maybe the future of news survival is to pair it
with a company that makes money, to support the journalism. Then again I feel
like that's how we got CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, etc. Maybe not a great idea. I
really like Blomberg and to some extent WSJ. I hope they can maintain their
integrity.

~~~
zanny
The future of news survival is independent journalists being funded by people
who care to have an unbiased investigative news media.

No idea how we get there, though. You basically need to persuade those who
understand how critical journalism is to freedom to care to fund it, and to
have a centralized platform to fund journalism that itself is not corruptible
by monied interests trying to push propaganda.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
> have a centralized platform to fund journalism that itself is not
> corruptible by monied interests trying to push propaganda

Why is a centralized platform necessary? Why isn't, e.g. Patreon, for
individual journalists or individual teams of journalists sufficient?

------
jasode
_> The Journal decided to stop letting people read articles free from Google
after discovering nearly 1 million people each month were abusing the three-
article limit. They would copy and paste Journal headlines into Google and
read the articles for free, then clear their cookies to reset the meter and
read more, Watford said._

After the harder paywall, what's the best guess of the percentage of those
google-copy-pasters will convert[1] to subscribers paying $278 or $296.94 or
$308.91 per year? My guess is less than 1/10th of 1%. I assume the vast
majority of the 1 million are casual readers who don't have $300 discretionary
income to splurge on a subscription. If they can't read for free with a
workaround, they'll do without it.

In related trivia, I just read that The Economist's strategy is to allow the
google-copy-pasters.

I'm not judging either company as right. It's interesting they go about it
differently.

[1] 1 year costs must include full rate to the teaser introductory rates:
[https://buy.wsj.com/wsjusjune17/](https://buy.wsj.com/wsjusjune17/)

~~~
runeks
The hardship for publishers won't end until two things happen, in my opinion:
1) they are willing to charge a reasonable price per article (no $300/year
subscription) and 2) they are _able_ to charge per article, in a cost-
effective manner (i.e. "micropayments").

~~~
dcosson
Why doesn't this exist yet? It seems so obvious, so many people get news from
Facebook, twitter, Reddit, (and to a lesser extent HN) on an article by
article basis. But all news sites delude themselves into thinking they can
make these people loyal customers of their content, to the tune of paying
$10-30 per month. I would happily pay $0.50 or something per article (maybe
price adjusted by word count, within reason) to be able to get news from a
wide variety of sources and engage with comments on the social/aggregator
sites.

Is it just too big of a chicken and egg problem to coordinate a single broker
for this across many sites? Unfortunately a broker is needed because I don't
think there exists an external payment method with fees reasonable enough to
make a lot of sub-1$ payments. That used to be touted as a use for Btc a few
years ago but now btc fees are higher than credit card fees at something like
$1-$3.

------
glitcher
This is the tradeoff WSJ opted for, and it really doesn't make sense for it to
work both ways. Web crawlers can't index content behind a paywall, end of
story.

Where WSJ has a big advantage is that they already have brand name
recognition. From the stats in the article it appears that this was a
profitable choice for them, however, a lesser know content publisher seeking
to monetize using paywalls is bound to have a much more significant challenge
attracting users without decent search result rankings.

~~~
hackcasual
They feel google is treating their paywalled content unfairly compared to
sites that offer content for free. They want their cake and to eat it too.

------
exelius
I reluctantly recognize that in order to have an unbiased press, we need news
readers to pay the costs of operating a newspaper. I'm happy to pay for my
news, because I want news to be truth, not propaganda.

Maybe the moral of the story is that Google News isn't the best source of news
-- just the cheapest.

Though I do think it would make sense for historical articles (i.e. articles
older than some arbitrary time period) should be removed from the paywall so
as to be searchable and able to be referenced.

~~~
Cakez0r
I have to disagree. People who are passionate about a subject will report on
it whether they're paid to or not. I would argue that being motivated by
profit only makes you _more_ susceptible to bias.

~~~
actuallyalys
I don't see why reporting the news is different from other jobs that people
have a passion for and provide value to society. Should scientists not be paid
because there are people who are curious about that natural world who would do
it for free?

~~~
Cakez0r
> Should scientists not be paid because there are people who are curious about
> that natural world who would do it for free?

I guess I'll come to the rescue of that strawman you're torching... Scientists
are free to work for money or passion, as people are free to fund research or
not. Whatever the balance of pay vs passion, science will continue to happen.

~~~
actuallyalys
I might have been too hasty. The first couple times I read it, I thought your
original comment was saying that paying for news wasn't worth it because
journalists who are willing to work for free are less biased. Rereading it, it
sounds like your point was more along the lines of paying for news in of
itself doesn't lead to less biased coverage.

------
1024core
> restricting the rest to its 2.2 million subscribers _or people who arrive
> via social media._

So they're fine with people from "social media" getting a 'free ride' ?

~~~
gruez
yep, hence why everyone switched to facebook.com/l.php

~~~
gvb
_The Journal’s ad revenue wasn’t affected by its recent drop in Google traffic
because social media visits grew 34 percent in that time, keeping overall web
traffic flat, Watford said._

Their numbers agree with your hypothesis: people simply switched from using
the (now closed) Google "payhole" to the social media "payhole."

~~~
amenod
... which must hurt Google. Well played, WSJ, well played. :)

------
sfilargi
Forbes tried something similar a while ago, by preventing ad blocker users to
access their articles. How did that work for them?

~~~
bubblethink
I guess it worked ok for them, given that they are still doing it. I can never
open a Forbes link. Not in a 'disable ad blocker pop-up' sort of way, but it
just redirects to the home page. Sometimes it would work after a couple of
tries. The upshot is that I never open Forbes links any more.

~~~
amyjess
Have you tried uBlock Protector?
[https://jspenguin2017.github.io/uBlockProtector/](https://jspenguin2017.github.io/uBlockProtector/)

~~~
bubblethink
No, but I use the anti-adblock killer. Is this better ? While it's a good
exercise academically, in the long run, I just don't visit sites that block
ad-blockers.

~~~
amyjess
The userscript that accompanies it catches a bunch of things that AAK misses.
Ctrl-Fing through the script, I see there's a section specifically for
"forbes.com".

------
thetruthseeker1
This is free market capitalism that Rupert Murdoch's company Fox News
promotes.

Google News fundamentally improved the online content publication system by
making it cheaper to its consumers.

Earlier, there were too many news companies whose content didn't necessarily
have an edge over some other news agency's and they charged money (which
worked in an age where no internet existed), and google has fundamentally
squeezed some of them including WSJ.

If the differentiating quality was present, more people might have been
willing to pay for WSJ.

When Harrison Ford made cars, lots of businesses who built business around the
inefficient means of transport (i.e the horse) like providing fodder for
horses, and blacksmiths who were building horse shoes or the ones building
horse carts got squeezed.

Same here. Internet and google has removed an inefficiency in the news system.
They need to adapt and provide a differentiating quality, else they will
perish - The principle of free market capitalism.

If WSJ needs google to behave a certain way so that it can make more money,
that is not free market capitalism.

~~~
cheez
I think you meant Henry Ford

~~~
thetruthseeker1
Yes, thank you!

------
workerIbe
This is great, for a while it seemed 80% of the top 5's were WSJ, I got really
tired of clicking to read a headline and getting the pop up saying something
like "Wow, you clicks us a lot, you must like us, how about you pay?", Well
no, actually you are just over ranked on so many topics...

~~~
buxtehude
I was annoyed too ... in my case I subscribed.

~~~
workerIbe
Interested, why? For any headline there are several sources, are you willing
to pay just to click on the top link?

~~~
buxtehude
Not all sources are equal in terms of quality and information provided in the
linked to article.

IMO, in certain areas (financial industry, investigative journalism,
international business issues, etc.) WSJ consistently has better coverage than
most other sources - so I'm willing to pay for it now that they've made it
much harder for me to get to it.

I regularly read other sources, and if at some point I feel I'm not getting
enough value from WSJ, I'll cancel.

------
27182818284
This submission's headline left out the other part of the opening sentence

    
    
        After blocking Google users from reading free articles in February, the Wall Street Journal’s subscription business soared
    

So their views of free folks fell while paid subscriptions rose. I would think
those subscriptions would be worth it, but as the article mentions "...argue
that Google’s policy is unfairly punishing them"

Personally, I would think that the subscribers would make it more worth it.
Afterall, I ended up adding components on to my NYTimes subscription and often
forget that I pay monthly for it because it isn't that expensive compared to,
say, home Internet and such.

------
yjgyhj
Online Adverts are a form of micropayment. It's currently the only way to
charge sub-cent amounts from users. It requires the third party of an
advertiser, which is a very expensive middle man.

If we can figure out how to do micropayments without users needing an account
somewhere (like PayPal), we can get rid of ads. That is the ultimate solution
to this long-winding conflict between users, advertisers and content creators.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
> how to do micropayments without users needing an account somewhere

That doesn't seem possible. What does even a hand-wavy sketch of this look
like to you? I'd guess it's possible without, e.g. a unique row in a single
(tho perhaps distributed) database table for each user, but I can't imagine it
really being different than an 'account' either, e.g. a Bitcoin 'wallet'.

------
DanielBMarkham
This is going to sound cold, but we need to have an honest chat here.

I would like a way never to see another WSJ or Forbes article on the internet.

I understand their need for profit, and I applaud them trying various things.
They might be the best thing since sliced bread. I applaud a free press. They
have a solid reputation, and I wish them the best.

However, I'm never going to pay. Ever. So I don't need to see their ads, I
don't need to follow-through on Google clicks. I just need them to disappear
from my internet experience completely. If you're going to run a paywall, I
would like to never be exposed to your brand name or the fact you have content
online. There are simply too many of you and too little minutes of
concentration that I have to offer.

If one day I see a physical copy of one of these publications and decide to
subscribe? That might be a lot of fun. But for now, don't waste any of my
brain cells showing me stuff I'm never going to consume. Worse yet, leading me
down some garden path only to be ambushed at the end with a paywall. Life's
short. Your publications are not an important part of mine. I think part of
the problem here was conflating the fact that X number of people clicked
through with the _assumption_ that somehow these were paying customers just
freeloading (see the title of the article).

That was never the case.

~~~
dredmorbius
Dnsmasq on your local router, or (with an appropriately capable system)
localhost does just this.

address=/wsj.com/0.0.0.0

Will null-route all of the Wall Street Journal.

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/b2ungqjvmlflvinrtp4cug](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/b2ungqjvmlflvinrtp4cug)

I've got an extended blockset now that includes a number of whole domains,
mostly hardwired in. Including all of outbrain at taboola.

------
mnm1
Good. These articles should be discriminated against by Google and ranked on
the second page at best. They _are worthless_. Without the subscription, the
whole site is worthless. Google is just reflecting that. WSJ has no right to
complain. If they don't like it, they should make their content not be
worthless. Pretty damn simple solution but it seems they prefer to whine
instead. If these idiots haven't yet understood the market for online content,
it's pretty hopeless anyway. People don't want to pay money for content
online, they will only pay with their privacy and personal data. There is
enough content to fill up millions, maybe billions of lifetimes. What part of
the supply / demand equation does the WSJ not get? Google is a search engine
for finding information on the Internet, not their personal ad agency. When
people search for news, they want to find news, not some paywall. How is it
Google's duty to hurt their own business so they can show what are essentially
foreign ads it makes no money on (nothing more, nothing less) to its users?

~~~
speby
Yep, this is the same sort of bullshit that Sexpertsexchange (experts-
exchange.com) used to to do. They performed "cloaking" that let the searching
index the entire page of content and then when regular users visited the site,
they threw up the paywall. WSJ (and of course expecting to continue to rank
well behind a paywall) is really just more of the same thing.

~~~
H1Supreme
Quickly stopped going to that site shortly after all that. I assume they lost
tons of traffic that way.

------
cornedor
I wonder if Google will be very helpful toward WSJ after they convinced a lot
of companies to stop advertising on YouTube.

~~~
daddyo
I also thought this was pretty rich. First broadly attack Google's income,
then complain about discrimination when Google ranks your paywalled content
lower.

Though I trust Google to make a decision based on user satisfaction, not
unrelated meta-politics like this: Any website with a paywall should (and
probably is) painted with the same brush. WSJ would benefit from pushing the
angle that "Google punished us for doing critical journalism".

------
Ensorceled
I wish there was some kind of "account sharing" with the media companies. I
have a Globe and Mail and a New York Times subscription because I want to
support journalism.

But then there is The Guardian, The Toronto Star, WSJ, ...

I'd happily pay $200 for a mega-subscription that went to a bunch of them.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
$200 a month? Because an annual WSJ subscription is ~$300 alone.

~~~
Ensorceled
Yes, an month. Both NYT and G&M are monthly subs.

i.e. I'm willing to pay $2400 a year for journalism.

------
snarfy
"You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site.”

That's not discrimination.

~~~
charonn0
It is discrimination, but not all discrimination is bad.

------
breck
Maybe there's an opportunity for a coalition of sources (WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg,
WP, et cetera), to get together with a SE like DuckDuckGo and allow deeper
search integration in some type of paid membership plan.

------
eddyg
Thank goodness there's one good use for AMP pages then, right?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389986](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389986)

------
shaunol
WSJ is discriminating against Google's user-base by blocking content that
Google presumed the user would have access to. Yet WSJ thinks they're the ones
being discriminated against. As WSJ is finding, Google will not even bother
attempting to index, sort and recommend content that is unavailable to 99.999%
of its user base. It's nice that they're supposedly better off, or at least
the same off, without high Google results. Though I doubt this will stop them
from endlessly attempting to game the system.

------
gumby
I loved this at the end of the article:

> “Tech companies are always going to do what’s in the interest of their
> business,”

As opposed to what businesses? Jeez, talk about a sense of _priviledge_.

------
blcArmadillo
So if I understood this correctly their paid subscriptions increased 30% and
their overall online traffic hasn't really been affected because people can
still get the content through social media. If my understanding is correct
then it seems this was a smart business move by the WSJ who is able to stand
on their own reputation instead of relying on people finding their content
through a third party.

------
reacweb
I read often WSJ articles for free on internet. This gives me a good opinion
of their articles. When I travel in train or plane, I often buy a physical
newspaper. I may favour WSJ because of this good opinion.

IMHO, blocking "free" readers will not increase paying customers on the long
run and may arm also their physical newspaper.

Reputation is something that takes long to earn and that can be lost very
quickly. RIP WSJ

------
mwexler
This sounds a lot like the Net Neutrality argument: All content should be
treated as equal, whether it's pay or not, whether it's powered or supplied by
the search engine/ISP or not.

Is there harm in ranking good content appropriately high (if relevant to the
search) if it's clear that there is a cost to access it? Could Google just
sigil "paid content" with a $ or € or whatnot?

~~~
fav_collector
It depends on what you mean by 'content'. If content is what non subscribers
see, then the content would be low quality.

------
Merovius
As a user, if I search for something, I want to get the information I was
searching for, not an offer to buy that information. A link to a page where I
can buy your product is not a search result; it's an ad. And it's totally fair
(and possible) for WSJ to be required to pay for their ads on Googles result
page, just like everybody else is doing.

(Disclaimer: Working for Google)

~~~
tzs
As a user, if I search for something, I want to be told where it can be found.
How to retrieve it once I know its location is a separate and independent
problem.

A search engine that excludes sources that will require pay to get the
information is a much less useful search engine to me, because it has no idea
if the information is important enough to me that I will pay to get it if no
free source is available.

------
bpchaps
@damn - Could you followup on your comment that you might disallow WSJ if they
ever did this?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620821)

------
cft
It allows to read with FB referrers. On desktop Chrome, use Referrer control
extension with facebook.com [http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-
get-around-th...](http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-
the-wsj-paywall/)

On mobile, make a private FB post visible only to yourself.

------
AKluge
I wonder how careful they were to distinguish between someone who cleared
their cookies, and two people behind a nat. It's possible that the number of
people abusing their system was smaller than they think.

------
edem
Why would I pay for their articles when they are no better than the free
alternatives? This is the same as Quora vs StackOverflow. Not only the latter
is vastly superior it is also free.

~~~
jkchu
Quora is free as well. It just requires you to create an account to view all
answers.

------
0003
Missing: links from Facebook increased significantly. (I imagine)

~~~
pcl
Actually, it's not missing. From the article:

 _The Journal’s ad revenue wasn’t affected by its recent drop in Google
traffic because social media visits grew 34 percent in that time, keeping
overall web traffic flat, Watford said. The Journal lets readers get some
articles for free via social media like Twitter and Facebook, which the paper
views as a marketing tool._

~~~
hoschicz
I think that 0003 meant that people circumventing the blocking by appending
l.facebook.com/l.php?url= increased in number.

~~~
0003
Yes - thanks. :)

------
bipr0
Its is not fair to charge for your content and get ranked high up in SERP,
especially for those who survives on AdSense and other ad networks.

------
jasonkostempski
About a year ago I made myself a little browser plug-in to remove all links to
sites I never want to visit again, wsj.com was the first one I added.

~~~
jacquesm
Could you post the list (and if you're really feeling kind the plug in)?

I'd love to add this to my filtering layer. Between Quora and ExpertSexChange
I really could do with some more blacklisting of sites that keep baiting me to
click.

~~~
dredmorbius
Best local method is to simply add sites to your local blocklist as you
encounter them.

For domain-wide blocks:

[https://pastebin.com/V5fyv3BT](https://pastebin.com/V5fyv3BT)

I also use a set of blocklists for advertising servers:

[http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt](http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt)
hosts1

[http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt](http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt)
hosts2

[http://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt](http://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt)
hosts3

[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts)
hosts4

~~~
jasonkostempski
This doesn't keep you from wasting time clicking links you didn't realize go
to a site you've already decided never to visit again.

~~~
dredmorbius
Agreed, though that takes more work.

It _does_ keep me from wasting time on the sites themselves, however, and in
time tends to train me to ignore the links.

I'm working on a system which might address your concern more directly.

------
KiDD
I just stopped reading WSJ... I tend to close any page that opens up to
something other than what I was expecting to see.

------
fourthark
I find that the WSJ abstracts are usually enough - I'm just clicking to find
out what was behind the bait.

------
dangayle
A time machine is the only solution. As a web developer for a family-owned
newspaper who recently removed our failure of a metered-paywall, the only
solution I've been able to come up with is a time machine that sends a killer
robot back to 1995/1996 and remove the incompetents industry wide who decided
to give away their expensive to produce content for free.

------
realmcsae
There's gotta be a way around this method...maybe letting bots view the whole
article.

~~~
citizens
As far as I know showing different content to different visitors (google bot
vs. users) is penalizable.

------
runeks
How about sites with paywalls signal this, including subscription price, in a
HTTP header (or whatever) to crawler bots?

Then Google users would be able to filter by "free results only" or "paid
results, less than $ _x_ /month". Seems like a relevant search criterion,
especially for industry-specific articles (like finance).

------
NN88
Not a lot of support here for information. This stuff isn't free.

------
meow_mix
This "discrimination" is by design, they should quit crying

------
AngeloAnolin
I think WSJ is wrong in saying that they are being punished by Google for
their paywalled articles appearing last in search results.

Google has algorithms that would need to actually crawl the entire content, to
ensure that it will provide the most relevant result. If it is unable to crawl
the entire content, then it becomes just as hard to rank the same in the
result.

Changing the algorithms to rank simply on the title and the first few (free
introductory) paragraphs of articles behind paid subscription can lead to more
bogus results. Google knows that invalid search results in turn disengages
their users from perusing their search engine.

------
angry_octet
Aptly demonstrates the effects of Trump think. A complete ignorance of network
effects, the belief effect in decision making.

------
gnicholas
My startup is about to launch a partnership with the Wall Street Journal that
will give our users free, un-paywalled access to the WSJ site.

If you want to join our beta, which is ongoing, sign up at
www.ReadAcrossTheAisle.com. The beta is free, and our app is free as well.
Hopefully this is relevant/useful for folks in this thread.

------
magic5227
As it should.

Paywalls present a worse user experience than say Bloomberg.com which shows
its content for free.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Bloomberg News is subsidized by the terminal business. It's free and public so
terminal users can send non-payers links. I guess if you want your news funded
entirely by a small group of people in the financial sector, that's fine. But
for those of us grateful for the work the _Wall Street Journal_ did to uncover
_e.g._ the Theranos scandal, paying for good journalism is the way to go.

~~~
magic5227
This isn't an assessment of content quality, it's of a user's experience.

All Google needs to do is optimize for things like time on page, CTRs, etc to
see users abandoning those with paywalls and not those without to decide one
is a better experience overall than another.

------
m-p-3
The decided to put their content behind a paywall, which makes the data needed
to sort it accurately in the search results unavailable.

You can't have your cake and eat it too, WSJ.

------
majani
Sounds like something that can be solved using special metadata for paywall
sites, along with a process to approve those who claim to be paywall sites.

------
timwaagh
this is why some sites (foreignpolicy.com) use client side paywalls. most
users don't know how to disable them, but google will rank you highly.

------
Medaber
I'm not sure if this will hurt the paid subscription model. I pay for WSJ.
People who want to rely on "free" news deserve the news they get.

While their google traffic may decrease, they may end up getting more paid
subscribers.

------
Jimmie_Rustle
“You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site.” Jesus
fucking christ, what a sentence. 'Google-bot can't index our pay-walled
articles... DISCRIMINATION!!!' fuck wsj, seriously

------
mudil
Google touts itself as a company that wants to catalog all the knowledge. How
is it possible that WSJ content ranking falls after the introduction of the
pay wall? Google has the ability to crawl behind the wall content, and yet it
downgrades the WSJ content. In my opinion, this is an abuse of its search
dominance position.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Google touts itself as a company that wants to catalog all the knowledge.
> How is it possible that WSJ content ranking falls after the introduction of
> the pay wall?

Because ranking is about utility to search users, and content not accessible
to general search users isn't useful to them. The knowledge (both the content
itself and the meta-data regarding it's inaccessible status) is still
cataloged, this is just making effective use of the meta-data for the purposes
of search UX.

~~~
buxtehude
But what if you do subscribe? Shouldn't those results filter up again? Google
knows I subscribe (the information is in my gmail account).

~~~
GuB-42
It is a difficult problem.

Google may know you are subscribed but it doesn't know what the page looks
like to you. It only knows its own version of the page.

What Google sees is that many people go to WSJ because their search query
matches the content of the googlebot version of the page, and then bounce back
as they hit the paywall. Google may not even know about the paywall. It just
sees that because many users bounce back, they must be unsatisfied, and derank
accordingly.

Now, it still has a workaround. If you are logged in, it tracks your personal
habits. And if it sees you are staying on WSJ, it may uprank it specifically
for you. Again, it is just a matter of staying on the site or not, google
doesn't really care about your subscription.

