Google to limit free access to news sites | Hacker News Reader

Google to limit free access to news sites

news.bbc.co.uk

14 pointsajg197715 comments

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?

Yea Google is just giving the newspapers the tools they need to shoot themselves in the foot. Ball back in your court, Murdoch!

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.

> 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?

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).

"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.

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.

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.

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

> Or a Firefox extension does this for me?

Isn't there already a bugmenot.com FF extension?

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

Might be done by IP.

I'm sure there's a way around it but is it really worth the effort? Anything important is going to be reported by multiple sources citing the original source in minutes. Niche information from a specific publication will be widely circulated among the various online communities that focus on that niche. The only people effected will be the ones who only have a casual interest -- the ones least likely to sign-up for free access much less pay. Once people get a taste for unlimited free information it's almost impossible to go back.

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.

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

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