Google to limit free news access
news.bbc.co.uk
news.bbc.co.uk
We've seen too much hand wringing and rhetoric and not enough action. Big media, you say internet users have been freeloading for too long, here are the tools to stop them, now use them. Internet users, you say you can do without access to major newspaper content, they've now limited your free access, so go do without.
I honestly don't know how it will play out in the end, but I'm pretty sure we'll see the future of news media rise from the ashes of the conflict, and I'm genuinely excited to see what it looks like.
In that thread I've explained what First Click Free really is (its not new), because the BBC article is quite misleading. This is a small policy change to throw a bone to top-tier publishers like NYTimes, and is unlikely to have the impact you've described.
More here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971414
This actually seems like it will have some noticeable (unintended) effects: won't it apply equally to Experts Exchange and their ilk?
(It's not clear what this all has to do with "First Click Free", which is an old program that seems to offer a smaller loophole in the "no bait-and-switch" rules. It's easiest to explain by example: If you go to a WSJ story via google, then click a link to another story, WSJ may ask you to register without being penalized by Google, even if that link didn't lead to a registration wall to the googlebot.)
That would make more sense.
I don't understand why Google has to be involved, unless they want to push things forward or be on good terms with Fox and co. A very hacky solution, IMHO, and an approach that won't lead news sites to profitability.
But if they do it right, they'll make the news sites happy as they are going out of business. The news sites will blame the users. Also, if they do it right, the users will be blaming the news sites and not Google.
I think Google is out to call Rupert Murdoch's bluff.
Now they have modified that stance to say if what you display before a user makes 5 visits to your site through google is different from what they are indexing, you are gaming the index and are dropped from it.
The new stance is pretty lame on Google's part, and IMHO it breaks the web.
- Google copies and stores news articles and serves them to users
- Google decides when users have to sign in upon visiting third-party news site.
These misconceptions are great if you're Rupert Murdoch. In reality, the change in Google's policy is minor:
- You are permitted to serve different content than the bot got (i.e. make them sign in) if the cookie on the other end has already requested 5 (or whatever) articles
- You could do that before, of course, but you would have gotten delisted for cloaking, just as with Google's web index. This is a new exception to that rule.
Laypersons have enough trouble understanding that news sites are not obligated to serve their content to Google. Making the issue more complicated (even if this isn't very complicated to us) may not be a good PR move.
This is absurd on so many levels. People find the article with Google, but it's the newspaper who puts it up for free. Yes, there is a question here, but this article is confused. The question is simple: newspapers produce content, Google indexes it, how do they split the ad revenues? I would think that both parties are free to put up ads on their pages, and they do, but newspapers are trying to cut into Google's ad revenue. I'm sure they're also willing to chip in to help pay for Google's cost of maintaining their index, after all, it's driving traffic to them...
If we're talking about a subscription article, then Google shouldn't (can't?) index it anyways?
In fact there's a ff plugin out there that lets you change your user agent id to that of google's bot. Lets you see free articles, porn, etc. But mostly porn.
Advertisement is the only way of revenue for news publishers, subscription is silly and short-sighted.
It's not entirely clear to me that this means that it's five pages from the same source - I think it might be five pages, total, from all participating sources.
Of course, the latter will change, as the company that owned them has announced plans to make their entire newspaper constellation (several hundred local newspapers across the UK) paywalled, and both local newspapers for me are owned by the same company.
BBC seems to do that more often than others.
And the Tories' response to this? They think the DE Bill is basically sound, but doesn't go far enough.
I think we can take it as read that both the Labour and Conservative parties, when faced with a choice between the British people, and lining foregners' pockets, will choose the latter, esepcially when they are big donors.
Oh, and guys -- you perhaps ought to consider writing for it. :) The HN crowd is very educated, so many of you are the ideal candidates to be writing the news, as you witness it.
As an example, my local newspaper and regional newspaper are both JP papers, and they are my primary source of local news online, as well as in print.
Is it any better now?
It's not a rebellious, "they're taking my free Internet" reaction, it's just an annoyance that I swat away, like a fly and with about as much thought. This post is orders of magnitude more thought than I've given it to date.
I wonder how many other people are going to react that way to FT and other sites?