Google Will Limit Free Access to Paid News Sites: New Opportunity for Smaller Publishers?

The Google – Print News story is reminiscent of some epic Greek war, sans any physical violence and fought on a battleground that is essentially just 2 digits long. The last move from the news publishing side was of their King Rupert Murdoch banning any Google bot to step in his territory. Worse (or better) still he has been asking other peers to follow in his steps in this corporate warfare of not dominance but survival and profitability.

Now either seeing sense in the news folks words or bowing to their might (the risk of not having any authentic content to provide to the users being high), Google has announced that it will limit a user’s access to content on a paid news site. According to BBC, Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google.  Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages.

WATBlog readers might remember that this First Click Free programme was the bone of contention between the two search engine and news media companies. As per the programme, any person visiting site’s like WSJ for instance from Google News can read the first paid article for free and after that he/she has to shell out money to read the other content. The loophole allowed many visitors to frequent WSJ through the backdoor from Google news thus catching all the paid content as free. This left media companies sharing a feeling not different from how Spartans felt when Paris cheekily took Helen as a parting gift.

And hence this move by Google, perhaps saying sorry and making amends to a promise not kept.

So has Rupert Murdoch won?

On the face of it, yes it does seem so, even if partly. However, what if Google plays a different game.

The different game

What if.. Google pushes the ranking of paid news sites down in their search algorithm.  It will then prove right, or wrong for that matter the ensuing debate’s main point from the online side- That news sites benefit from Google with the traffic that the Behemoth sends them. And it is a good 20% to 30% that Google has sent to major news sites over the years. Will this move impact this traffic is an important question that will find an answer in the coming days.

Now we all know Google isn’t evil and it has sworn to the Greek Gods of today that it won’t indulge in evil. So Google might not penalise the site rankings. But at the same time it has to provide users with content, and a payment page is not content.

To my mind, 80 to 90% might just go elsewhere than buy the subscription. Then again one might argue that if someone visits a site 6 times they wouldn’t have any problem paying for news that they are evidently finding useful. On the other hand these are not site loyalists, they come to the site as a result of Google search, so visits are not entirely based on loyalty as much as it is of SEO and good headline copies. Are these good enough reasons to loosen the strings?

This might impact the search results purely from the point that users are not getting the content they seek and therefore sites which offer better content (compared to a subscription page) might get ranked higher. That means that comparatively smaller publishers can have a better chance of attracting visitors, and quite a chance that will be, if the algorithm shifts in their favor.

And where does this put Bing and Yahoo and their search. Will they have to follow suit regardless of the pittance of traffic they provide? Or will this turn out to be an opportunity for them to attract the traffic that Google now can’t cater to.

So while news publishers might celebrate this move by their nemesis, will it end up being that mistake Hector made in the battle of Troy which woke Achilles up against them to finally burn Tory down?