You are here: Home » Technology » News » Others
Business Standard

Google relaxes rules on free news stories, plans subscription tools

Google would share data with the news organizations to enable them to keep up the customer relationship

AFP | PTI  |  Washington 

google

announced new steps to help struggling today — including an end to a longstanding "first click free" policy to generate fresh revenues for publishers hurt by the shift from print to digital. The moves come amid mounting criticism that online platforms are siphoning off the majority of revenues as more readers turn to digital platforms for "I truly believe that and publishers actually share a common cause," said Vice President "Our users truly value high quality journalism." announced a series of measures, the most significant of which would be to replace the decade-old policy of requiring to provide one article discovered in a search without subscribing — a standard known as "first click free." This will be replaced by a "flexible sampling" model that will allow publishers to require a subscription if they choose at any time. "We realise that one size does not fit all," said Richard Gingras, Google's vice president for This will allow organizations to decide whether to show articles at no cost or to implement a "paywall" for some or all content. Gingras said the new policy, effective Monday, will be in place worldwide. He said it was not clear how many publishers would start implementing an immediate paywall as a result. "The reaction to our efforts has been positive," he told a conference call announcing the new policy. "This is not a silver bullet to the subscription market.

It is a very competitive market for information. And people buy subscriptions when they have a perception of value." said it is recommending a "metering" system allowing 10 free articles per month as the best way to encourage subscriptions. The California tech giant also said it would work with publishers to make subscriptions easier, including allowing readers to pay with their or account to avoid a cumbersome registration process. "We think we can get it down to one click, that would be superb," Gingras said. He explained people are becoming more accustomed to paying for news, but that a "sometimes painful process of signing up for a subscription can be a turn off. That's not great for users or for publishers who see subscriptions as an increasingly important source of revenue." would share data with the organizations to enable them to keep up the customer relationship, he added. "We're not looking to own the customer," he said. "We will provide the name of user, the email and if necessary the address." Gingras said is also exploring ways "to use machine learning to help publishers recognize potential subscribers," employing the internet giant's to help organizations. He added that was not implementing the changes to generate revenues for itself, but that some financial details had not been worked out.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

First Published: Mon, October 02 2017. 20:17 IST
RECOMMENDED FOR YOU

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU
http://www.business-standard.com/article/technology/google-relaxes-rules-on-free-news-stories-plans-subscription-tools-117100200353_1.html
www.business-standard.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-09
227496
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:OZPOZZPXZACHH3YWZ7OVN23HAA7QIWQQ
<urn:uuid:b7916c7d-63b0-428c-a9eb-f533118fcc41>
2018-02-18T01:52:23Z
23.13.173.128
text/html
sha1:I5CF2NP6PIDOG3EEL44PGEYUHIAI4H4T
<urn:uuid:80783add-0d4e-418c-863b-75fac3a9ad6b>
http://www.business-standard.com/article/technology/google-relaxes-rules-on-free-news-stories-plans-subscription-tools-117100200353_1.html
response
<urn:uuid:c2a2f639-eca9-4e2d-86a2-a92072dd7822>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-146-251-249.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-09
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf