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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?
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."
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.
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
Translation: "I saw an opinion that wouldn't fit in my safe space, so I ran away from my standard Republican-leaning news source to an alt-right-leaning news source." There's nothing liberal about the WSJ, as even a cursory glance at their editorials will reveal.
The simple truth is that there a million sources for news.
There actually aren't. The vast majority of news is generated from a handful of organizations with real humans on the ground doing the work. The other "sources" of news read and summarize those original articles, often with a much lower quality level. If you believe that by searching the internet for news you're getting a "million" different opinions and analyses, you're just wrong.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
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.