Mountain View, California — Google, facing the wrath from media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and some other newspaper owners over the way it offers free access to newspaper articles, said it will allow publishers to set a new parameter on the number of articles people can read for free through its search engine, the company has announced.
Google said users who click on more than five articles in a day may be diverted to payment or registration pages. In addition, some users have been able to avoid paying subscriptions or registration by accessing news articles through Google.
“Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free,” Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen said in a blog post.
“Now, we have updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing.”
For example, users can now read WSJ.com articles for free if you search for them on Google News and then click through. News Corp, the owner of the Wall Street Journal, is aware of this, but ignores it because otherwise Google would not index its site and then it will lose 25 percent of its traffic.
Now Google is empowering publishers to opt into a First Click Free program, which should actually be called the “First Five Clicks Are Free”. A news site now can restrict the number of free clicks from Google News for any individual to five a day. After that, anyone coming to their site from Google News will see a pay wall asking them to subscribe to read more. They can set the value higher if they want or not have any limit at all. It is up to them.
Google’s announcement came as the News Corp. chairman, who has warned to prevent the Internet giant from indexing his newspapers, and other US media heavyweights gathered here to discuss journalism in the Internet age.
Murdoch, addressing the two-day meeting hosted by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), said newspapers “need to do a better job of persuading consumers that high quality reliable news and information does not come free.”
“Good journalism is an expensive commodity,” said the 78-year-old Murdoch, who repeated his intention to begin charging readers of News Corp. newspapers on the Web.
Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, charged Murdoch and other newspaper publishers meanwhile of being in “digital denial” and said they needed to “stop whining.”
Murdoch has blamed Google and other news aggregators for “stealing” stories without distributing advertising revenue and has reportedly been holding talks with Microsoft about making News Corp.’s content accessible exclusively through the software giant’s new search engine, Bing.
According to BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones, the concession was relatively minor but Murdoch might see it as vindication of his decision to take on Google.
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