Do Newspapers Expect A Paid Subscription Model Online?
Some time back, eMarketer talked about a survey according to which, a surprising number of North American papers were considering charging for online content – 60% polled were considering charging for content that was currently free, and one-quarter expected to have a paid strategy in place within six months. Could this even be an online strategy?
Looks like the publishers, led by Rupert Murdoch, are taking it seriously enough to discuss banning Google from indexing their pages.
The result – a revamp of Google’s First Click Free program to prompt online readers to register or subscribe to a news provider’s site after reading five free articles from that publisher in a day. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages. Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free, and hence provided the users a not-so-quick but dirty way to access the content on the website via a Google search for free.
Along with that, Google has also released a web crawler specifically for Google News, which would make it easier for publishers to exclude themselves from Google News, but retain their indexing in Google if they want to. As this post mentions:
If they wanted to, it’s always been easy for publishers to keep their content out of Google News and still remain in Google Search. They just had to fill out a simple contact form in our Help Center. Now, with the news-specific crawler, if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don’t even have to contact us – they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today. In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They’ll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free. All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is REP.
Is the era of free getting over, or will this be the opportunity that smaller publishers were looking for?
Related posts:
- A New Subscription Model For Content?
- When newspapers go online
- Is Paid Online Video A Viable Business Model?
- Now Search Magazines On Google Book Search
- As Books Go Digital, Is A New Model Evolving?
The views expressed here are my own, and do not reflect, or are related to the views of my organization.