Another Brick in the Paywall

[Guest]

Google (-0.64%) announced it will scrap its “first click free” policy and move toward helping publishers drive more digital subscriptions. 

The policy worked like this: say you were looking for an article from a paywalled publication (like…the WSJ or NYT’s report on this exact story). You’d be able to sidestep the paywall by searching for the article on Google. That’s because the search engine strong-armed news outlets into allowing users three free articles per day.

Sure, publications could theoretically have opted out of the policy, but Google would bury them on page 2,000 of the search results…right below your cousin’s travel blog. And considering Google drives 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ sites, that’s something you don’t want to mess with.

Instead, Google’s introducing a new policy called “flexible sampling,” where publishers decide (without fear of punishment) the number of free articles they offer. But will greater independence lead to more subscriptions? That’s an answer we don’t have access to.