Slashdot Mirror
Google May Limit Free News Access
You know how, if you want to read a paywalled newspaper article, you can just paste its title into Google News and get a free pass? Those days may be coming to an end. Reader Captian Spazzz writes: "It looks like Google may be bowing to pressure from folks like News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch. What I don't understand is what prevents the websites themselves from enforcing some limit. Why make Google do it?" (Danny Sullivan explains how they could do that.) "Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google, the company has announced. The concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages. Publishers will join a First Click Free programme that will prevent web surfers from having unrestricted access. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages."
Presumably there'll be a cookie to remove, or a BugMeNot account, or a way of creating/managing the 50 accounts needed to read as before.
It seems to me that the people that advertise in newspapers would feel as though they were willing to pay more for ads if the newspapers would put the entire content online. Restricting access will turn around and bite the newspaper industry. The will rue th day they thought of restricting access.
Well, that's the other side of the coin; if I'm willing to pay for my news, will I finally be rid of all the ads? I think not.
Take life easy: one bit at a time.
There is a large effort needed to write quality stories...a lot of calling people, driving around interviewing, checking documents etc.pp
Many people, myself included, won't favor paying for what is passing as news because the stuff above doesn't happen. If there are journalists and writers actually doing in-depth analysis, writing thought provoking stories, with relevant and accurate facts, people will pay for it. Right now, I see more of this is being done in magazines, not newspapers.
I think this is fine. But I suggest Google then allow me the option to remove articles that I cannot freely access.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
The way cable tv has gone makes me suspect that paying will indeed just get you the same ads as before (or more!), but at a higher cost to you.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Why is this a YRO story? In all seriousness, it's a "newspaper's rights online." They have every right to do with their content what they wish. If they suffer financially for their decisions, then it serves them right. But there's no inherent right to free access to the content they produce.
Bark less. Wag more.
This is to a large extent the result of AP and Reuters covering most stories "well enough". If AP or Reuters cover a story, thousands of papers, down to po-dunk local papers in the middle of nowhere, have sufficient coverage of the story for many people. So people rightfully don't care about the brand, because a large proportion of the content literally is the same across brands.
Sure, the BBC, NY Times, WSJ, Economist, and a few others have original content. But in most cases, AP/Reuters cover a story well enough, so the demand for additional unique content is not nearly as high as traditional demand for a newspaper was--- when it might have been the only way for every only-sort-of-plugged-in people to get the news. Now you really have to care enough to know why you want a particular paper's extra content, and really care to be willing to pay for it.
I'm not sure how dead the unique-content players are, though. The Economist is notably successful in selling its wares, and the WSJ hasn't been doing terribly either, despite Murdoch's whining.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Indeed, why bother doing the acrobatics to work around it. I read BBC news, a few local newspapers, a couple of sites like slashdot and a few decent blogs to catch up on whats going on. If Murdoch wants to get people paying for what is free elsewhere, he'll discover how the internet routes around damage, at which point he'll either back up and try to find some other payment model, or he'll fold.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Exactly, and I think in this case it makes a lot of sense. I formerly worked for a major newspaper, and due to various complicated contracts with different entities, option [c] had to be chosen. I.e. a lot of stuff we de-listed from google (which we didn't want to do), because we couldn't be seen to be (obviously) giving content away, while others were paying dearly for it.
This is distinctly different to the "Google should pay *us* for the privilege of listing our content", which is clearly insane.
Note, obviously there are always going to be ways around registration/subscription, especially if you have n clicks free, which is probably going to be cookie based... but these require a bit more technical know how, and could be seen as being on less stable ground legally, so are acceptable loop holes. But just going via google and getting anything free is a bigger deal. I don't see why news organisations shouldn't have the right to charge for the content they want to charge for. If that business model is flawed, then the market will sort that out, right?
I have written to their support, posted on their forums -please Google - if you are listening - MAKE PAYWALLED SITES AN OPTION in my preferences and set it OFF by default.
YES, please. My god I hate this aspect of Google, which is an incredibly annoying time-suck. It's even worse for me because I have a uni account that gives me access to most of the paywalled research, but only when I'm on campus, so when I'm off-campus and I want to know something I just desperately want the option to turn off all that paywalled crap.
This is by far the most hateful, stupid and annoying thing Google does, and in close to a decade of searches I have never once purchased article access from one of these pirates (academics don't get paid by journals for their manuscripts, and now that publishing costs have fallen to almost nothing due to Web delivery there is absolutely no excuse for the kind of rates academic publishers are charging. Open access journals are the future, and the sooner Google gets on board with the future, the better).
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
These guys are really lazy and until they get serious, you will only need two firefox plugins:
1. a User Agent Switcher to turn your browser into googlebot
2. a cookie manager like CookieSafe that lets you block cookies on a per-site basis.
Maybe someday they'll upgrade to flash cookies, and use those to count the articles you've read,
but I don't see them ever spending the money on the hardware necessary to control access by IP.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This does work in some cases (when the sites don't check IP addresses - most of the most popular ones do now) - but your work around does not help stop the steady debasement of search result quality as more and more companies outside of the research article industry setup these paywalled schemes. Do you really want the first two pages of your search results behind a paywall - even if you can work around the problem for some of them? What ticks me off is that you usually don't realize it is paywalled until after you have clicked through.
I wish there were a way to exclude pay-walled pages from the search results. What do you think about it, Google?