Google Dropping ‘First Click Free’ Policy For News Websites

Back in the day, there were many news outlets that relied purely on advertising revenue to generate income for their websites. However these days with ad blockers becoming more commonly used, publications are looking at alternative means of generating income, such as through subscription models.

However in order to prevent users from being blocked by paywalls at each and every turn, Google had a policy in place that mandated publishers to offer at least 3 free articles a day before users ran into a paywall, which clearly did not sit well with publishers until recently where Google seems to have done away with the policy.

According to Richard Gingras, vice-president of news at Google, “While research has shown that people are becoming more accustomed to paying for news, the sometimes painful process of signing up for a subscription can be a turn off. That’s not great for users or for news publishers who see subscriptions as an increasingly important source of revenue. To address these problems we’ve been talking to news publishers about how to support their subscription businesses.”

Basically now Google will allow publishers to decide how many articles, if any, they want to offer for free before users come across a paywall. This will clearly affect the way we consume our news as there could be some publications that might be more generous, while others could be more stingy.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Google