Google Announces It Will Limit Free News
Posted: Wednesday, December 02, 2009
by Asher Ricard
The next move has been made in the media industry standoff with Google. Google has announced that users who click on more that five articles in a day will be routed to payment or registration pages.
We've updated the programme so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing," Josh Cohen, senior business product manager, said in a blog post.
I think this is the reason why I am not head of a major corporation. I really commend Google for going out of the way to appease the newspaper industry.
But let's be honest here, if Google did not link to their websites, these groups would be whining about that. They would accuse Google of not generating valuable online traffic.
This is a no win situation. However, I think it is safe to say that Murdoch has scored one in the win column with this announcement.
All of the controversy about free news or paid news stemmed from a complaint from Rupert Murdoch who is trying to portray Google as an evil giant for linking to his news for free.
As a consumer of the news, this just means that I read the articles I can read and then move on to a publication that does not charge. The hurt will come the day that all publications begin to charge.
I am curious to see where this goes next. Good job Google in the public relations arena. Let's see what Murdoch does next.
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)Personally, I think it won't be long before Murdock is sorry he got what he wished for.
This can easily backfire. People tend to make very simple connections, IE "I click that, it goes to something I have to pay for. So I'm not going to click that." The whole sixth time thing may or may not come in to play...those who don't pay may just stop going to those sites.This means decreased traffic, which means advertisers are not willing to pay nearly as much for space on those sites, and I'm sure they make more money off advertisers than they do people who actually pay for news on the web.I hope this spells Murdock's doom. The economy can't be rid of that guy soon enough
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