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Wall Street Journal's Google Traffic Drops 44% After Pulling Out of First Click Free (bloomberg.com)
In February, the Wall Street Journal blocked Google users from reading free articles, resulting in a fourfold increase in the rate of visitors converting into paying customers. The tradeoff, as reported by Bloomberg, is a decrease in traffic from Google. Since the WSJ ended its support for Google's "first click free" policy, traffic from Google plummeted 44 percent. From the report: Google search results are based on an algorithm that scans the internet for free content. After the Journal's free articles went behind a paywall, Google's bot only saw the first few paragraphs and started ranking them lower, limiting the Journal's viewership. Executives at the Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., argue that Google's policy is unfairly punishing them for trying to attract more digital subscribers. They want Google to treat their articles equally in search rankings, despite being behind a paywall. The Journal's experience could have implications across the news industry, where publishers are relying more on convincing readers to pay for their articles because tech giants like Google and Facebook are vacuuming up the lion's share of online advertising. Google says its "first click free" policy is good for both consumers and publishers. People want to get the news quickly and don't want to immediately encounter a paywall. Plus, if publishers let Google users sample articles for free, there's a better chance they'll end up subscribing, Google says. The tech giant likens its policy to stores allowing people to flip through newspapers and magazines before choosing which one to buy.
After what the WSJ did to Youtube (cost them 1 billion dollars) how the holy shit does WSJ still have anything to do with Google? Why didn't they delist them, ban them from adsense, and try to pretend they don't exist on the internet as payback for their bullshit?
Let me fetch my tiny violin for that bastion of biased Republican reportage, shall I?
I had subscriptions to The New York Times and Wall Street Journal for years, so the paywall situation doesn't effect me. However, I agree with the way Google prioritizes free content vs. paywall content. WSJ will have to find the sweet spot between offering free content and acquiring subscribers. Just like every other content creator on the Internet.
You cannot establish a medium (the Internet) based on free and open access and expect to convert it into a paid medium. The simple truth is that there a re million sources for news. Whether or not they are reputable doesn't matter to the mass consumer (or so it appears). If you begin to charge for content, you will only receive the small sampling of people who care about the reputation of your site. So - STOP WHINING. Geeze. This is the market people. Stop trying to fit your old broken models on the folks who were born in an era where free and open content meant they did not have to pay. Sometime I think marketing analysts should be under the age of 30. (I'm 50 and recognize this - what morons...)
They index and rank what is available. If you want something to be indexed and ranked... make it available. I've no sympathy at all for someone who wants simultaneously have and eat their cake.
The market will find a balance between monetization and reader base. I suspect it will involve giving away a complete summary and limiting subscribers to those interested in in-depth analysis.
Want to know the future? Look at what college kids are doing. When Forbes implemented their paywall the number of citations they recieved, and more importantly the number of citations the authors and articles highlighted in Forbes, dropped to almost nothing. Just look up the cite numbers at your local Alma Mater Library portal.
Forbes is dead to anyone under 28.
Now the Wall Street Journal wants to go the same route. What do these companies think will happen when potential customers grow up, go to university, get advanced degrees, and start their career without having any direct contact? They think of paywalled companies as relics of their parent's generation, doomed to die and never convert to customers.
Having a paywall is an explicit "We want our company to die with baby boomers."
At the level of easiest answer, it's not like Google's algorithm has any keywords to use from a locked out site...
So WSJ wants what is essentially free advertising for its articles. If it's so important, WSJ should pay Google with Ad Sense like every other company.
Google's search result would be trash if every other link led to a page that needs subscription. Plain and simple. Then there are those geolocked sites, too...
When I stopped being able to read articles on WSJ for free I stopped clicking on links that directed to WSJ at all
Wall Street Journal gets some of their revenue from online advertising.
Do they not think that online advertising is a legitimate and effective means of promotion?
Then why don't they pay up and use Google Adwords to promote their pay subscriptions services?
They are complaining about something they were getting for free.
The WSJ was one of the first to move to a subscription service model online. If you are at a certain level in politics, business or finance you read the WSJ and that is not going to change.
For decades, sites have been falling over themselves to appear more palatable to search engines. Now REVOLT! Good for the net. Keep it up.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Support a Bitcoin payment per article then I'd be willing to pay!
You are the Wall Street Fucking Journal!!!! Why do you let a 3rd party handle your ad space?!?!?!?!?!
Did they pay per click back when you were in print? Of course not! Did they pay through the nose to be in your pages anyways? Hell yes they did!
You guys need to stop failing at being YOU and be YOU again! All print media needs to do this in their transition, they already have the audience, advertisers want your audience, so manage it and stop being such whiners! Google ain't your enemy, you gave them power over you by ceding the ad market to them. The only way to fix it is to take back the ad market. Stop using 3rd party ad networks and manage yourselves again properly.
BIG FRIKKIN HINT: If you sell your adspace directly, you can host all advertising on your servers and thus defeat Adblocking inherently. Javascript blocking is more difficult, but far fewer of the ad blocking public know about or use that due to the need to micromanage it.
Provide two versions of each story, a short form and a long form. The short form is free. And no, that isn't what they do already. What they provide now is a teaser, which is NOT a short form - it's a teaser that provides no value for those who aren't willing to subscribe or do what it takes to see the long form.
The free, short form has to provide worthwhile benefits for those who read it, and be linkable from sites like this one.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/w...
On May 19th, WSJ published an editorial AGAINST Net Neutrality. Now, they want a provider to lean over backwards to give them better access to customers, for "fairness". LOL hypocrites.
"They want Google to treat their articles equally in search rankings, despite being behind a paywall"
When I Google I look for article(s) that I can read, not articles that I have to hand over my wallet in order to read
I only hand my wallet over to my wife
Well, you know the problem with Google's "first click free", was that if you repeatedly used incognito mode to Google search any WSJ article headline and open the link, every click turned out to be free... So the WSJ may have gotten wise to that and realized that completely cutting off people would finally get them to pony up the money.
Same for a lot of paywalls where they want to get you in the door but aren't measuring the unintended effects (cannibalizing their own subscription rate) very well....
7 years ago Techdirt had an article, "Saying you can compete with free is saying you can't compete period.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070215/002923/saying-you-cant-compete-with-free-is-saying-you-cant-compete-period.shtml
Oh, wait a minute. This is one of pretend-Capitalisms dinosaurs. Obviously, they will try to bribe, I mean donate, to make laws insuring a steady stream of money into their coffers. That is what the movie, music, computer, ISP, cable, insurers, phone companies...I'm sure I'm missing many more have done.
If there's a better argument for anti-trust investigations against Google than this, then I can't think of it.
Google's search results are returning worse data (robots.txt respected) because the end result has decided not to rely on ad-supported (meaning: Google AdSense supported since they have a lion's share on the industry) content rather than the website doing whatever makes sense for itself, under the guise of the ever-ambiguous "user experience". This is not a some hacked, fly-by-night website altering content like it's 2002 again.
Google wants to index the world's information? Fine. Deciding its own policies on information retrieval and what business model it wants to promote? No bueno.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
The tech giant likens its policy to stores allowing people to flip through newspapers and magazines before choosing which one to buy.
This analogy might carry more weight if there was a virtual store clerk eying you after you've been reading the same newspaper article for more than thirty seconds,
Think globally but act within local variable scope.
They probably allow access to "googlebot" just not other browers. So technically possible, but against google tos.
So what's stopping us from posing as Googlebot? Are WSJ also filtering on IPs?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
"owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., argue that Google's policy is unfairly punishing them for trying to attract more digital subscribers."
Even in theory it is impossible to "unfairly punish" Murdoch's News Corp.
I'd pay for curation of search results that blocks/advises the likes of pInterest, paywalls etc
A blog I run for the wealth
one is tied to the location, be it a newstand, bookstore or coffeshop..even if you read a discarded copy on the train someone paid for it.
facebook shows up near the top for some business listings but since i dont have fb, i get a banner filling half the screen. perhaps they can open ot to the crawler but obstruct the viewer to maximize their listing...i assume the more keyword hits the higher they would be barring any payola-type arrangements or negative weighting for undesirable domains. perhaps they should put tags in the visible area to boost their hit count. if they are genuinely the best result o dont care if its high up on the list but to counter that theu should tag the result...[login required] so i dont click on it.
some forums seem to be able to get high listings even though when i click the link i get a login page which is irritating.
they should buy the advertisement on google.
seeriously. if they cannot view the info for free how the fuck could they index it for free and why would anyone of googles customers like that info to be there in the first place if they cannot access it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Learn what it means.
aka "Whoosh".
I'm from sweden and I'm still aware of WSJ, partly by historical reasons when it the paperversion was a legend no one had actually read. But that memory is fading. Lately as a hobby investor I been landing on WSJ every now and then thou links from newsites and bloggers (Yes quite a few of my blogger have equal quality of WSJ in their articles, but only publish every second week or so).
Anyway back to the point, the reason WHY I'm currently know about WSJ is that I end up on the site every now and then, and so does the bloggers and reporter that feed me with information.
But as a occasional reader (about 6articles per year) I would never subscribe to the paper, if it was easy I might be convinced to spend maybe $0.1-0.5 depending on the interest and length of the text, and for older articles I would expect to pay alot less bit it would still generate some money for the papper and writer.
Ofcourse what would be needed would be a easy way to have a uni site digital wallet where I could despose a few dollars using my visa card and then use to buy articles (and possible other micropayments online as well.)
Media nowadays panders, not investigates, because pandering gives more revenue and is cheap whereas invesgitation is really expensive, time consuming and if it doesn't pander to the preconceptions of the owner or the reader, it's "fake news" or "partisan BS" (and by partisan I mean rightwing partisan, there's practically nil leftwing partisan BS because there's no mainstream method to get leftist points out there, the overton window having shifted so widely to the right and closed down the left).
And if all you're going to get is pablum pandering you might as well ignore the "high quality" papers and go for the openly partisan blogrolls.
In trying to cut corners the media have done it to themselves.
The search engines purpose is to locate accessible information.
Information behind a paywall is not accessible, hence should not be indexed.
As it is behind a paywall, it is up to the owner to provide their own indexing and search capability.
Simple enough for you?
Unfortunately these days it seems it is not simple enough for Google.
This is because it long ago stopped being a search system, and instead became an information aggregator, of which search is only one area of application.
Google has realised that controlling all the information is more valuable than providing an index of it, hence they are willing to participate in these games.
I have a long string of "-site:xxxxxxxxx.com" to add to pretty much any search query I use, simply to weed out the useless pages. Just add "-site:wsj.com" to yours.
I wish Google would offer the option to store such a string and add it automatically to every query you send. I'm pretty sure that information would be enlightening, also to their advertisers...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The answer is obviously the first one and a ranking algorithm is going to take relevance into account. I don't see any reason that Google owes any paywall site a free lunch. More to the point, putting paywalls high in the list risks degrades the quality of results and therefore hurts Google.
Google should tell them to GTFO. Maybe even delist paywalls entirely.
Really not surprised by what the WSJ does. But I also don't want results in searches that require me to pay to read them. If I am paying for the WSJ or any other publication. I would think that I would be reading those publications directly. If I am searching for stories through Google or any other engine, I would want results I can browse through.
What is a search engine's purpose? To find you relevant information? Or to find you less relevant free information?
If the information is trapped behind a paywall then the search engine can't find it for you. At most it can hint that it might exist. The WSJ wants to have its cake and eat it too. They basically want google to provide free advertising for them. I have no interest in a subscription to WSJ and as far as I'm concerned any results trapped behind a paywall should rightfully be lower in the rankings of relevance. If I wanted a subscription to WSJ I would already have one. If WSJ wants to trade fewer total readers for more paying readers I get that and have no problem with it. But I also have no interest in google returning search results that are trapped behind paywalls because that is approximately useless to me.
NT
News is an elastic and substitutable commodity.
Charge for it, or make me jump through hoops to read it on your website? Your free competitor is two clicks away.
What is a magazine, and why would anyone want their business to be treated like one?
I would like a button to permanently kill all for-pay news sites in search results and Google News: I never want to see them.
It would also be helpful if Google made it easier to remove specific news sources with a single click.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Since when does Wikipedia have ads, other than its pledge drive? If there are ads in articles, or ads as articles, edit them to remove soapbox content. You might be confusing Wikipedia with "Fandom powered by Wikia", a completely separate site.
I can hear Chopsticks on a vibraphone playing in my head right now!
Can't get you a free pony, but here's a pony for $10.
Let's be clear about something, because if we can't agree on this one simple thing, then we're also not going to agree on anything else:
Google has some mechanism where they can blacklist certain sites for malware, and their web browser (Chrome) uses this to prevent users from visiting certain sites. That is something that they could possibly use to punish someone. But that's not being alleged here.
And as for search results themselves, Google Search never has, and never will punish someone, because it lacks the capability to punish, and would still lack it even if they were a hundred times more powerful. The worst case scenario for Google searches, would be if they had search results point to pages that criticize your business. But not linking to your pages is not punishment. Failing to go to extra trouble to help someone is not punishment.
WSJ is worried about Google becoming neutral to them. They are worried that Google will stop doing helpful things FOR them. They get free cake, and would hate for the free cake to stop.
Agreed? Punishment isn't what we're talking about here. (So stop using dishonest words to describe it, unless deception is your intent.)
If you understand and totally agree to this, then we're in the same ethical galaxy and might possibly have a good discussion. Else, we have absolutely nothing in common and we probably won't even be able to communicate.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
You always have a choice. My choice is to add problem sites to my hosts file as 127.0.0.1;
This simple move serves to solve the paywall (and autoplay video, and spammy page covering ad, and junklink [try this one weird trick!], and we-don't-allow-commenting-sites, and similar) problems.
As far as the news goes, many non-paywalled sources remain. I use them.
Perhaps someday the news will move from a for-profit model to a for-the-people model. That'd make it much more worth supporting. Unless/until then... pffft.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
When Sanders was running for the Democratic nomination, the NYT, Washington Post, and Guardian - which are all more or less liberal operations - "failed to adequately report" (by which I mean intentionally downplayed) coverage of his campaign.
I don't need "news" that uses bias to push its own agenda. That's not news. That's propaganda. "Quality level" isn't just about writing well. It's also about reporting without bias. The more bias there is, the less the actual value of the source. It really doesn't matter if they have reporters on the ground if what gets in the news source is all triaged into viewpoint-addled-mush.
I do want to know what's happening. Informing me of that in a completely even-handed manner, IMHO, is the news media's only legitimate job. I'll form my own opinions on it. Since the news media is doing a very, very poor job of avoiding exactly that kind of bias, I'll keep looking elsewhere. Even a poor-grammar, poor-spelling summary of one of those articles is better if the MSM slant is edited out.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes we all want free stuff. I personally wouldn't mind exchanging my pair of socks for a free T-shirt. But that aside, promoting free news over paid news means a lot of the unvetted amateur news stuff will get up ranked. Before you say "well I am a conservative why should I care?" It wont necessarily work in your favor.
...then google's customers will stop preferring google. They may be the dominant market force right now, but things can change pretty fast in the tech industry.
Part of the reason that people use google is that they have policies stating that when a user clicks on a link, they see the same stuff that google sees. In other words, google provides the kind of search results that people tend to want. If they start favoring paywall sites over users, then upstart search engines like DuckDuckGo or whatever would be more than happy to snap those users up.
How in the exact crap it helps is that the links to paywalled sites stop working - they fail instantly (I actually generate a "this URL is disabled in hosts" page... OSX has a built-in webserver) and you're not deluged with crap like "pay me." Hit back (or whatever key combo your browser uses for back), you're back at google. No screwing with the junk sites, basically an immediate response, doesn't even have to hit the network.
Not only does this keep the offending site from sullying your browser, it doesn't even give them the courtesy of an Internet reach-around: the click never reaches their servers.
If you don't want paywalled sites, the best move is to vote with your wallet and you clicks. So don't go to them, even accidentally. This accomplishes that. Sites that misbehave are dead to you.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
There's these things called anti-trust laws. You may have heard of them. The idea that Google is all powerful is exactly why Google is not at liberty to use its power.
As long as Google isn't specifically discriminating against WSJ it doesn't apply. It sounds like they have the same algorithm for WSJ articles as everyone else. No abuse of power here. WSJ is seemingly looking for special treatment from Google that they haven't paid Google for.
WSJ etc. need to take a breath. Google isn't there to be their 'free advertising', if they want to paywall their stuff, fine. Then pay for advertising on Google to get people to go to your site, otherwise shut the F up.
I think he should go have a word with WSJ on behalf of Google.
WSJ, and a few other web sites with an attitude, have been in my hosts file for more than a year. I really don't miss them, and laugh at their click-bait headlines.
I think that it is a good thing for search engines to index information behind paywalls, or any other “obstruction” (for example content of printed books): that would bring us closer to a universal search tool. With paywalls, it could be done using special credentials provided to search engines by the publisher (assuming that a standard gets developed for that). That would solve the problem of the search engine downranking articles for only seeing fragments of them.
On the other hand, I’d want those same search engines to make it easy (through settings) for users to include or exclude such information (by category: paywalled, books, etc.) from the results of their search, with customisable exceptions (for example, a user might want to include results from a firewalled journal to which he subscribes but not others).