First-click to keep publishers happy
Jinfo Blog

3rd December 2009

By Penny Crossland

Item

This week, Google and Rupert Murdoch went head-to-head in their battle over online access to news. (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27220). At a conference on the future of journalism run by the US Federal Trade Commission (http://digbig.com/5baskq), Murdoch reiterated his views on news aggregators such as Google who, in his view, profit from distributing news without giving revenue back to the publishers. Never one to mince his words, Murdoch called the aggregators’ practice ‘content theft’ (http://digbig.com/5baskr). At the same conference, Google has come out fighting, reminding publishers that the search engine sends news sites 4 billion clicks a month, which adds up to some considerable revenue. However, Google made some concessions to publishers this week: It has upgraded its First-Click Free programme, which was originally launched in October 2008 (http://digbig.com/5baskb), although to little fanfare. The modification to the programme now means that users who click on more than five articles per day from a publisher will see a registration page, asking them to subscribe if they want to read more. Publishers are also able to set the limit higher or lower if they wish. This should answer some of the publishers’ concern regarding loss of online subscription revenues, however, as many commentators have pointed out (http://digbig.com/5baskf), this does not take online searching or reading habits into consideration. Most online readers of news will click though to a couple of articles and then move on to other sites. The debate looks set to continue.

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