30 ms·

WSJ Ends Google Users' Free Ride, Then Fades in Search Results

469 points by mudil 9y ago

sfilargi 9y ago
Forbes tried something similar a while ago, by preventing ad blocker users to access their articles. How did that work for them?
- chc 9y ago
  That doesn't seem like as big a deal. Ad blocker users are not uncommon, but not the majority either. "Google users" is quite possibly the broadest demographic you could possibly lose.
  - seanp2k2 9y ago
    It seems like "They're building an ad blocker into Chrome?! Ooh yeah????!!! We'll show them!" happened internally. Taking bets on them being out of business or sold at a greatly diminished value in 3 years or less.
    - bubblethink 9y ago
      I wouldn't be so sure. They probably rely significantly on enterprise/university/library subscribers. Journals haven't gone anywhere despite being paid forever. This will also switch to the journal bait and switch model. Show the abstract in google results, but require money to read the full article.
- abuani 9y ago
  That's a great question: They're still a company that I read articles from every now and then, so I personally assume they're doing well enough to still exist. How did it work out for them? Not trying to be a snarky bastard here, I genuinely want to know how it worked out for them, because I don't know this story and am too lazy to do research on it right now, and given the tone of your comment, I'd imagine it'll be easier for you to provide me some starting material to give me a head start.
  - sndean 9y ago
    I'm not who you replied to, but I was genuinely curious too. This is the best evidence I can find [0][1]... It looks like it probably did negatively impact Forbes (and other websites that have blocked adblockers). But if they're sticking with that behavior, maybe it's not so bad? I also saw that their physical magazine readership is up (while other competing magazines are down or flat). [0] https://thestack.com/world/2016/04/21/sites-that-block-adblockers-seem-to-be-suffering/ https://thestack.com/world/2016/04/21/sites-that-block-adblo... [1] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/forbes.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/forbes.com
- bubblethink 9y ago
  I guess it worked ok for them, given that they are still doing it. I can never open a Forbes link. Not in a 'disable ad blocker pop-up' sort of way, but it just redirects to the home page. Sometimes it would work after a couple of tries. The upshot is that I never open Forbes links any more.
  - amyjess 9y ago
    Have you tried uBlock Protector? https://jspenguin2017.github.io/uBlockProtector/ https://jspenguin2017.github.io/uBlockProtector/
    - bubblethink 9y ago
      No, but I use the anti-adblock killer. Is this better ? While it's a good exercise academically, in the long run, I just don't visit sites that block ad-blockers.
      - amyjess 9y ago
        The userscript that accompanies it catches a bunch of things that AAK misses. Ctrl-Fing through the script, I see there's a section specifically for "forbes.com".
- workerIbe 9y ago
  I don't know how it worked out for them but I will usually disable my adblocker for sites I like that ask nicely and their adds are not too obnoxious.
leggomylibro 9y ago
Makes sense from Google's point of view. You are no longer providing value to our users. You will be quickly replaced with something that provides more value to our users.
- revmoo 9y ago
  Agreed. Seems simple to me; if you stop providing the content those users are coming for, they stop coming. Why is this hard for NYT to understand?
- GhostVII 9y ago
  It also makes sense because they can't crawl a page that is behind a paywall.
  - 2_listerine_pls 9y ago
    Of course they let in google's crawler.
    - CydeWeys 9y ago
      The whole purpose of making a webcrawler for a search engine is that you are crawling the content that a user will see upon clicking a link in search results.
      - 2_listerine_pls 9y ago
        Even if it's behind a paywall, there is benefit in crawling it. For instance, if you happened to be a logged WSJ user, then google could show you the result based on your cookies.
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        Googlebot does not crawl the web separately for each user with a copy of that user's credentials borrowed from their browser. Aside from the privacy and security issues, it would require Google to multiply it's search resources by the number of users.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
magic5227 9y ago
As it should. Paywalls present a worse user experience than say Bloomberg.com which shows its content for free.
- arjie 9y ago
  Bloomberg.com is great at giving you rubbish quickly. The WSJ is better at giving you good information for a fee. Depends on what you want to optimize for, I suppose.
  - H4CK3RM4N 9y ago
    Are you really going to argue that Bloomberg, the one which is able to make Bloomberg Terminal[1] a good value proposition, is worse in terms of quality of information than the Washington Post? [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/solution/bloomberg-terminal/ https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/solution/bloomberg-te...
    - arjie 9y ago
      > Are you really going to argue that Bloomberg, the one which is able to make Bloomberg Terminal[1] a good value proposition, is worse in terms of quality of information than the Washington Post? No, because I don't read the Washington Post and I don't see why it's relevant. But yes, I do claim that bloomberg.com is a poor source of news. Bloomberg.com is to the Bloomberg Terminal as the Amazon Fire Phone is to AWS. Sure, the same company makes both, but one is rubbish and the other is something professionals use all the time.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  Bloomberg News is subsidized by the terminal business. It's free and public so terminal users can send non-payers links. I guess if you want your news funded entirely by a small group of people in the financial sector, that's fine. But for those of us grateful for the work the Wall Street Journal did to uncover e.g. the Theranos scandal, paying for good journalism is the way to go.
realmcsae 9y ago
There's gotta be a way around this method...maybe letting bots view the whole article.
- citizens 9y ago
  As far as I know showing different content to different visitors (google bot vs. users) is penalizable.
glitcher 9y ago
This is the tradeoff WSJ opted for, and it really doesn't make sense for it to work both ways. Web crawlers can't index content behind a paywall, end of story. Where WSJ has a big advantage is that they already have brand name recognition. From the stats in the article it appears that this was a profitable choice for them, however, a lesser know content publisher seeking to monetize using paywalls is bound to have a much more significant challenge attracting users without decent search result rankings.
- hackcasual 9y ago
  They feel google is treating their paywalled content unfairly compared to sites that offer content for free. They want their cake and to eat it too.
Androider 9y ago
If you click a search result and end up seeing something completely different than what you expected based on the search result snippet, it shouldn't matter if you're the WSJ or a scam site trying to hack your Google rank. It's deceiving the user and inflating your search ranking at the expense of more deserving listings.
- eropple 9y ago
  Yup. We used to call it "cloaking", I don't know if that's still a term in use in the SEO world.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Google still calls it that. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en
    - artursapek 9y ago
      They are known to crawl using human-like user agents instead of the typical Googlebot one precisely to counter this (weak) effort at playing the system. I'm surprised WSJ is surprised by the outcome here.
      - x0x0 9y ago
        They're in no way surprised; they're trying to marshal public outrage or lean on anti-trust efforts in order to force google to rank them higher.
    - mistermann 9y ago
      I wish google would give us somewhere to report sites that are doing this.
      - tyingq 9y ago
        It's here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en It specifically mentions cloaking.
chollida1 9y ago
Watching this very closely, I pay for a WSJ subscription because I think their content is better than most, and also because I get sent alot of links to their content. Something about this later point feels like the argument people make about using Office because people still send them Excel and Word docs. Similar to how software companies release free software to augment what makes them money, Bloomberg is able to spend a lot of money on producing content that is sponsored by their terminal subscriptions. The WSJ might be in a unique situation where their primary audience will pay, often due to companies footing the bill for employee's, so perhaps they can be one of the few news producing companies that doesn't have to depend on Google for traffic in that their primary audience loads up their front page multiple times a day just to see what's there. I wouldn't be surprised if they did a deal with Bloomberg to provide their content on terminals to further strengthen their ties to their core audience.
- Simulacra 9y ago
  That's a really good point. Maybe the future of news survival is to pair it with a company that makes money, to support the journalism. Then again I feel like that's how we got CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, etc. Maybe not a great idea. I really like Blomberg and to some extent WSJ. I hope they can maintain their integrity.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    > Maybe the future of news survival is to pair it with a company that makes money, to support the journalism To be honest, that's the past and present of most news as well. Newspapers would have never been around based on advertising alone. The fee usually paid for printing and sending, and classifieds made up the bulk of the revenue. Now that they're decoupled and both news and classifieds are pretty much free, it's no wonder that news is struggling. Hard news has (almost) never been a wildly profitable endeavor in and of itself.
  - zanny 9y ago
    The future of news survival is independent journalists being funded by people who care to have an unbiased investigative news media. No idea how we get there, though. You basically need to persuade those who understand how critical journalism is to freedom to care to fund it, and to have a centralized platform to fund journalism that itself is not corruptible by monied interests trying to push propaganda.
jasonkostempski 9y ago
About a year ago I made myself a little browser plug-in to remove all links to sites I never want to visit again, wsj.com was the first one I added.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Could you post the list (and if you're really feeling kind the plug in)? I'd love to add this to my filtering layer. Between Quora and ExpertSexChange I really could do with some more blacklisting of sites that keep baiting me to click.
  - vultour 9y ago
    Forbes would be the first one on my list, every time I see that advertisement landing page the quickest Forbes tab closing challenge is on.
    - jasonkostempski 9y ago
      I think that was my second :) It's in the list for ssure.
  - NathanKP 9y ago
    Not sure if this is the OP's extension but I use Personal Blocklist for Chrome.
    - jasonkostempski 9y ago
      Not mine, that only seems to work on Google search results which is rarely the problem I have. Reddit, HN, etc. often link to sites I already know I don't want to go to, my plug-in removes them from there. I copy the list to my RSS client so it filters them out there too.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Best local method is to simply add sites to your local blocklist as you encounter them. For domain-wide blocks: https://pastebin.com/V5fyv3BT https://pastebin.com/V5fyv3BT I also use a set of blocklists for advertising servers: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt hosts1 http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt hosts2 http://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt http://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt hosts3 http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts hosts4
jasode 9y ago
>The Journal decided to stop letting people read articles free from Google after discovering nearly 1 million people each month were abusing the three-article limit. They would copy and paste Journal headlines into Google and read the articles for free, then clear their cookies to reset the meter and read more, Watford said. After the harder paywall, what's the best guess of the percentage of those google-copy-pasters will convert[1] to subscribers paying $278 or $296.94 or $308.91 per year? My guess is less than 1/10th of 1%. I assume the vast majority of the 1 million are casual readers who don't have $300 discretionary income to splurge on a subscription. If they can't read for free with a workaround, they'll do without it. In related trivia, I just read that The Economist's strategy is to allow the google-copy-pasters. I'm not judging either company as right. It's interesting they go about it differently. [1] 1 year costs must include full rate to the teaser introductory rates: https://buy.wsj.com/wsjusjune17/ https://buy.wsj.com/wsjusjune17/
- i_cant_speel 9y ago
  Agreed. I just downloaded an extension so I don't even have to bother with searching Google anymore.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
  > I assume the vast majority of the 1 million are casual readers who don't have $300 discretionary income to splurge on a subscription. Or that the vast majority have much better uses for $300 than paying for a newspaper.
- xemdetia 9y ago
  I think that's the main thing that is different than my normal relationship with a newspaper. If I see an article that catches my fancy I buy that newspaper, if I don't I don't buy it (or the 'Sunday version'). While the universe would prefer I pay a subscription it's just not how I have ever interacted with a news publishing outfit. I think part of my issue with the wsj complaint here is just trying to go back to the subscriber driven model but I have never worked with them that way. That's what makes that teaser rate even more frustrating- I just would want to pay and not try to make a financial decision or subscription. Can I just pay $5 for a week and not have a dog and pony show around it? I'm not so interested in a particular publication to want to make this kind of commitment.
cornedor 9y ago
I wonder if Google will be very helpful toward WSJ after they convinced a lot of companies to stop advertising on YouTube.
- daddyo 9y ago
  I also thought this was pretty rich. First broadly attack Google's income, then complain about discrimination when Google ranks your paywalled content lower. Though I trust Google to make a decision based on user satisfaction, not unrelated meta-politics like this: Any website with a paywall should (and probably is) painted with the same brush. WSJ would benefit from pushing the angle that "Google punished us for doing critical journalism".
exelius 9y ago
I reluctantly recognize that in order to have an unbiased press, we need news readers to pay the costs of operating a newspaper. I'm happy to pay for my news, because I want news to be truth, not propaganda. Maybe the moral of the story is that Google News isn't the best source of news -- just the cheapest. Though I do think it would make sense for historical articles (i.e. articles older than some arbitrary time period) should be removed from the paywall so as to be searchable and able to be referenced.
- ng12 9y ago
  > I'm happy to pay for my news, because I want news to be truth, not propaganda I don't think there's a significant correlation there at all. The NYTimes hawks subscriptions almost as heavily as the WSJ.
  - exelius 9y ago
    While the conservative media pundits like to rail against the NYT, it's actually a very reputable news source that fact-checks articles and issues retractions when it is wrong. Sure it's a bit left-leaning in the topics they report on, but they're usually not wrong.
    - actuallyalys 9y ago
      Agreed. I tend to think of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as being mirror images of each other: they're both reputable and based in NYC [0], but the NYT has a liberal bent and the WSJ has a conservative one. [0]: Being based in the largest city of the east coast gives them a different set of biases, which aren't entirely political.
- workerIbe 9y ago
  The irony may be that the best way to get paid is to be biased.
  - fgonzag 9y ago
0003 9y ago
Missing: links from Facebook increased significantly. (I imagine)
- pcl 9y ago
  Actually, it's not missing. From the article: The Journal’s ad revenue wasn’t affected by its recent drop in Google traffic because social media visits grew 34 percent in that time, keeping overall web traffic flat, Watford said. The Journal lets readers get some articles for free via social media like Twitter and Facebook, which the paper views as a marketing tool.
  - hoschicz 9y ago
    I think that 0003 meant that people circumventing the blocking by appending l.facebook.com/l.php?url= increased in number.
    - 0003 9y ago
      Yes - thanks. :)
workerIbe 9y ago
This is great, for a while it seemed 80% of the top 5's were WSJ, I got really tired of clicking to read a headline and getting the pop up saying something like "Wow, you clicks us a lot, you must like us, how about you pay?", Well no, actually you are just over ranked on so many topics...
- NathanKP 9y ago
  Yeah I got annoyed for the same reason and used the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension to block WSJ from showing up in my search results at all. And recently I had to add Forbes to the same list.
- buxtehude 9y ago
  I was annoyed too ... in my case I subscribed.
  - workerIbe 9y ago
    Interested, why? For any headline there are several sources, are you willing to pay just to click on the top link?
    - buxtehude 9y ago
      Not all sources are equal in terms of quality and information provided in the linked to article. IMO, in certain areas (financial industry, investigative journalism, international business issues, etc.) WSJ consistently has better coverage than most other sources - so I'm willing to pay for it now that they've made it much harder for me to get to it. I regularly read other sources, and if at some point I feel I'm not getting enough value from WSJ, I'll cancel.
1024core 9y ago
> restricting the rest to its 2.2 million subscribers or people who arrive via social media. So they're fine with people from "social media" getting a 'free ride' ?
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  Many people used Google specifically to get around the newspaper's paywall. I imagine fewer people will use social media to do that. As a result, the fraction of content requests that are honest referrals would be expected to be higher.
  - rcraft 9y ago
    You can easily use Twitter search logged out or without an actual Twitter account: https://twitter.com/search-home https://twitter.com/search-home. Not hard to see the same google copy and pasters will just move to Twitter search.
- gruez 9y ago
  yep, hence why everyone switched to facebook.com/l.php
  - gvb 9y ago
    The Journal’s ad revenue wasn’t affected by its recent drop in Google traffic because social media visits grew 34 percent in that time, keeping overall web traffic flat, Watford said. Their numbers agree with your hypothesis: people simply switched from using the (now closed) Google "payhole" to the social media "payhole."
    - amenod 9y ago
      ... which must hurt Google. Well played, WSJ, well played. :)
AngeloAnolin 9y ago
I think WSJ is wrong in saying that they are being punished by Google for their paywalled articles appearing last in search results. Google has algorithms that would need to actually crawl the entire content, to ensure that it will provide the most relevant result. If it is unable to crawl the entire content, then it becomes just as hard to rank the same in the result. Changing the algorithms to rank simply on the title and the first few (free introductory) paragraphs of articles behind paid subscription can lead to more bogus results. Google knows that invalid search results in turn disengages their users from perusing their search engine.
27182818284 9y ago
This submission's headline left out the other part of the opening sentence After blocking Google users from reading free articles in February, the Wall Street Journal’s subscription business soared So their views of free folks fell while paid subscriptions rose. I would think those subscriptions would be worth it, but as the article mentions "...argue that Google’s policy is unfairly punishing them" Personally, I would think that the subscribers would make it more worth it. Afterall, I ended up adding components on to my NYTimes subscription and often forget that I pay monthly for it because it isn't that expensive compared to, say, home Internet and such.
rory096 9y ago
Note that the Twitter workaround still works: https://t.co/2t073JIAWe https://t.co/2t073JIAWe https://www.wsj.com/articles/british-police-identify-london-attackers-as-may-calls-for-crackdown-on-extremists-1496663010 https://www.wsj.com/articles/british-police-identify-london-... Just append site:twitter.com to your Google search, click through, and voila.
- CptJamesCook 9y ago
  Can you explain this in more depth? I can't make it work. Thanks
  - jshevek 9y ago
    I believe they are saying: if you find the tweet announcing the article, you can click through from the tweet and view the article.
- aoeusnth1 9y ago
  This doesn't work for me. Do I need javascript enabled for it to work?
  - calcifer 9y ago
    Yes you do, unfortunately. I had to allow scripts for t.co in NoScript for it to work.
- curiousgal 9y ago
  Confirmed. Clicking on any article from @wsj Twitter feed works.
- NelsonMinar 9y ago
  WSJ also still serves articles to folks coming from Facebook. There's a Chrome extension to redirect all WSJ URLs through Facebook to bypass the paywall, works for now.
  - 9y ago
gnicholas 9y ago
My startup is about to launch a partnership with the Wall Street Journal that will give our users free, un-paywalled access to the WSJ site. If you want to join our beta, which is ongoing, sign up at www.ReadAcrossTheAisle.com. The beta is free, and our app is free as well. Hopefully this is relevant/useful for folks in this thread.
breck 9y ago
Maybe there's an opportunity for a coalition of sources (WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg, WP, et cetera), to get together with a SE like DuckDuckGo and allow deeper search integration in some type of paid membership plan.
mnm1 9y ago
Good. These articles should be discriminated against by Google and ranked on the second page at best. They are worthless. Without the subscription, the whole site is worthless. Google is just reflecting that. WSJ has no right to complain. If they don't like it, they should make their content not be worthless. Pretty damn simple solution but it seems they prefer to whine instead. If these idiots haven't yet understood the market for online content, it's pretty hopeless anyway. People don't want to pay money for content online, they will only pay with their privacy and personal data. There is enough content to fill up millions, maybe billions of lifetimes. What part of the supply / demand equation does the WSJ not get? Google is a search engine for finding information on the Internet, not their personal ad agency. When people search for news, they want to find news, not some paywall. How is it Google's duty to hurt their own business so they can show what are essentially foreign ads it makes no money on (nothing more, nothing less) to its users?
- speby 9y ago
  Yep, this is the same sort of bullshit that Sexpertsexchange (experts-exchange.com) used to to do. They performed "cloaking" that let the searching index the entire page of content and then when regular users visited the site, they threw up the paywall. WSJ (and of course expecting to continue to rank well behind a paywall) is really just more of the same thing.
  - H1Supreme 9y ago
    Quickly stopped going to that site shortly after all that. I assume they lost tons of traffic that way.
DanielBMarkham 9y ago
This is going to sound cold, but we need to have an honest chat here. I would like a way never to see another WSJ or Forbes article on the internet. I understand their need for profit, and I applaud them trying various things. They might be the best thing since sliced bread. I applaud a free press. They have a solid reputation, and I wish them the best. However, I'm never going to pay. Ever. So I don't need to see their ads, I don't need to follow-through on Google clicks. I just need them to disappear from my internet experience completely. If you're going to run a paywall, I would like to never be exposed to your brand name or the fact you have content online. There are simply too many of you and too little minutes of concentration that I have to offer. If one day I see a physical copy of one of these publications and decide to subscribe? That might be a lot of fun. But for now, don't waste any of my brain cells showing me stuff I'm never going to consume. Worse yet, leading me down some garden path only to be ambushed at the end with a paywall. Life's short. Your publications are not an important part of mine. I think part of the problem here was conflating the fact that X number of people clicked through with the assumption that somehow these were paying customers just freeloading (see the title of the article). That was never the case.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  There are browser extensions which will remove links for you based on domains. BlockSite is one.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Dnsmasq on your local router, or (with an appropriately capable system) localhost does just this. address=/wsj.com/0.0.0.0 Will null-route all of the Wall Street Journal. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/b2ungqjvmlflvinrtp4cug https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/b2ungqjvmlflvinrtp4cug I've got an extended blockset now that includes a number of whole domains, mostly hardwired in. Including all of outbrain at taboola.
AKluge 9y ago
I wonder how careful they were to distinguish between someone who cleared their cookies, and two people behind a nat. It's possible that the number of people abusing their system was smaller than they think.
cft 9y ago
It allows to read with FB referrers. On desktop Chrome, use Referrer control extension with facebook.com http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-the-wsj-paywall/ http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-th... On mobile, make a private FB post visible only to yourself.
mudil 9y ago
Google touts itself as a company that wants to catalog all the knowledge. How is it possible that WSJ content ranking falls after the introduction of the pay wall? Google has the ability to crawl behind the wall content, and yet it downgrades the WSJ content. In my opinion, this is an abuse of its search dominance position.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Google touts itself as a company that wants to catalog all the knowledge. How is it possible that WSJ content ranking falls after the introduction of the pay wall? Because ranking is about utility to search users, and content not accessible to general search users isn't useful to them. The knowledge (both the content itself and the meta-data regarding it's inaccessible status) is still cataloged, this is just making effective use of the meta-data for the purposes of search UX.
  - buxtehude 9y ago
    But what if you do subscribe? Shouldn't those results filter up again? Google knows I subscribe (the information is in my gmail account).
    - GuB-42 9y ago
      It is a difficult problem. Google may know you are subscribed but it doesn't know what the page looks like to you. It only knows its own version of the page. What Google sees is that many people go to WSJ because their search query matches the content of the googlebot version of the page, and then bounce back as they hit the paywall. Google may not even know about the paywall. It just sees that because many users bounce back, they must be unsatisfied, and derank accordingly. Now, it still has a workaround. If you are logged in, it tracks your personal habits. And if it sees you are staying on WSJ, it may uprank it specifically for you. Again, it is just a matter of staying on the site or not, google doesn't really care about your subscription.
- Flenser 9y ago
  > Google has the ability to crawl behind the wall content I thought they weren't. How does that work? Do they have a login for WSJ? That would benefit WSJ as an incumbent news provider at the expense of startups too new or small to get special treatment from Google.
bpchaps 9y ago
@damn - Could you followup on your comment that you might disallow WSJ if they ever did this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620821
snarfy 9y ago
"You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site.” That's not discrimination.
- charonn0 9y ago
  It is discrimination, but not all discrimination is bad.
yjgyhj 9y ago
Online Adverts are a form of micropayment. It's currently the only way to charge sub-cent amounts from users. It requires the third party of an advertiser, which is a very expensive middle man. If we can figure out how to do micropayments without users needing an account somewhere (like PayPal), we can get rid of ads. That is the ultimate solution to this long-winding conflict between users, advertisers and content creators.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  > how to do micropayments without users needing an account somewhere That doesn't seem possible. What does even a hand-wavy sketch of this look like to you? I'd guess it's possible without, e.g. a unique row in a single (tho perhaps distributed) database table for each user, but I can't imagine it really being different than an 'account' either, e.g. a Bitcoin 'wallet'.
mwexler 9y ago
This sounds a lot like the Net Neutrality argument: All content should be treated as equal, whether it's pay or not, whether it's powered or supplied by the search engine/ISP or not. Is there harm in ranking good content appropriately high (if relevant to the search) if it's clear that there is a cost to access it? Could Google just sigil "paid content" with a $ or € or whatnot?
- fav_collector 9y ago
  It depends on what you mean by 'content'. If content is what non subscribers see, then the content would be low quality.
- speby 9y ago
  Maybe but that means the search engine had access to the article's contents "for free" and therefore has a copy of that content in its index. If I am not also able to access that content the same way the search engine does (aka ... for free as an anonymous or not-logged-in user), that makes it a lot less appealing.
majani 9y ago
Sounds like something that can be solved using special metadata for paywall sites, along with a process to approve those who claim to be paywall sites.
meow_mix 9y ago
This "discrimination" is by design, they should quit crying
m-p-3 9y ago
The decided to put their content behind a paywall, which makes the data needed to sort it accurately in the search results unavailable. You can't have your cake and eat it too, WSJ.
thetruthseeker1 9y ago
This is free market capitalism that Rupert Murdoch's company Fox News promotes. Google News fundamentally improved the online content publication system by making it cheaper to its consumers. Earlier, there were too many news companies whose content didn't necessarily have an edge over some other news agency's and they charged money (which worked in an age where no internet existed), and google has fundamentally squeezed some of them including WSJ. If the differentiating quality was present, more people might have been willing to pay for WSJ. When Harrison Ford made cars, lots of businesses who built business around the inefficient means of transport (i.e the horse) like providing fodder for horses, and blacksmiths who were building horse shoes or the ones building horse carts got squeezed. Same here. Internet and google has removed an inefficiency in the news system. They need to adapt and provide a differentiating quality, else they will perish - The principle of free market capitalism. If WSJ needs google to behave a certain way so that it can make more money, that is not free market capitalism.
- cheez 9y ago
  I think you meant Henry Ford
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - thetruthseeker1 9y ago
    Yes, thank you!
eddyg 9y ago
Thank goodness there's one good use for AMP pages then, right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389986
Medaber 9y ago
I'm not sure if this will hurt the paid subscription model. I pay for WSJ. People who want to rely on "free" news deserve the news they get. While their google traffic may decrease, they may end up getting more paid subscribers.
angry_octet 9y ago
Aptly demonstrates the effects of Trump think. A complete ignorance of network effects, the belief effect in decision making.
edem 9y ago
Why would I pay for their articles when they are no better than the free alternatives? This is the same as Quora vs StackOverflow. Not only the latter is vastly superior it is also free.
- jkchu 9y ago
  Quora is free as well. It just requires you to create an account to view all answers.
shaunol 9y ago
WSJ is discriminating against Google's user-base by blocking content that Google presumed the user would have access to. Yet WSJ thinks they're the ones being discriminated against. As WSJ is finding, Google will not even bother attempting to index, sort and recommend content that is unavailable to 99.999% of its user base. It's nice that they're supposedly better off, or at least the same off, without high Google results. Though I doubt this will stop them from endlessly attempting to game the system.
Jimmie_Rustle 9y ago
“You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site.” Jesus fucking christ, what a sentence. 'Google-bot can't index our pay-walled articles... DISCRIMINATION!!!' fuck wsj, seriously
gumby 9y ago
I loved this at the end of the article: > “Tech companies are always going to do what’s in the interest of their business,” As opposed to what businesses? Jeez, talk about a sense of priviledge.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dangayle 9y ago
A time machine is the only solution. As a web developer for a family-owned newspaper who recently removed our failure of a metered-paywall, the only solution I've been able to come up with is a time machine that sends a killer robot back to 1995/1996 and remove the incompetents industry wide who decided to give away their expensive to produce content for free.
fourthark 9y ago
I find that the WSJ abstracts are usually enough - I'm just clicking to find out what was behind the bait.
NN88 9y ago
Not a lot of support here for information. This stuff isn't free.
Merovius 9y ago
As a user, if I search for something, I want to get the information I was searching for, not an offer to buy that information. A link to a page where I can buy your product is not a search result; it's an ad. And it's totally fair (and possible) for WSJ to be required to pay for their ads on Googles result page, just like everybody else is doing. (Disclaimer: Working for Google)
- tzs 9y ago
  As a user, if I search for something, I want to be told where it can be found. How to retrieve it once I know its location is a separate and independent problem. A search engine that excludes sources that will require pay to get the information is a much less useful search engine to me, because it has no idea if the information is important enough to me that I will pay to get it if no free source is available.
bipr0 9y ago
Its is not fair to charge for your content and get ranked high up in SERP, especially for those who survives on AdSense and other ad networks.
reacweb 9y ago
I read often WSJ articles for free on internet. This gives me a good opinion of their articles. When I travel in train or plane, I often buy a physical newspaper. I may favour WSJ because of this good opinion. IMHO, blocking "free" readers will not increase paying customers on the long run and may arm also their physical newspaper. Reputation is something that takes long to earn and that can be lost very quickly. RIP WSJ
Ensorceled 9y ago
I wish there was some kind of "account sharing" with the media companies. I have a Globe and Mail and a New York Times subscription because I want to support journalism. But then there is The Guardian, The Toronto Star, WSJ, ... I'd happily pay $200 for a mega-subscription that went to a bunch of them.
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  $200 a month? Because an annual WSJ subscription is ~$300 alone.
  - Ensorceled 9y ago
    Yes, an month. Both NYT and G&M are monthly subs. i.e. I'm willing to pay $2400 a year for journalism.
- kelukelugames 9y ago
  Sounds like a start up idea. People can share their netflix account for someone with an extra NYT account. :P
timwaagh 9y ago
this is why some sites (foreignpolicy.com) use client side paywalls. most users don't know how to disable them, but google will rank you highly.
runeks 9y ago
How about sites with paywalls signal this, including subscription price, in a HTTP header (or whatever) to crawler bots? Then Google users would be able to filter by "free results only" or "paid results, less than $x/month". Seems like a relevant search criterion, especially for industry-specific articles (like finance).
blcArmadillo 9y ago
So if I understood this correctly their paid subscriptions increased 30% and their overall online traffic hasn't really been affected because people can still get the content through social media. If my understanding is correct then it seems this was a smart business move by the WSJ who is able to stand on their own reputation instead of relying on people finding their content through a third party.
KiDD 9y ago
I just stopped reading WSJ... I tend to close any page that opens up to something other than what I was expecting to see.

469 points by mudil 9y ago

Forbes tried something similar a while ago, by preventing ad blocker users to access their articles. How did that work for them?

chc 9y ago
That doesn't seem like as big a deal. Ad blocker users are not uncommon, but not the majority either. "Google users" is quite possibly the broadest demographic you could possibly lose.
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  It seems like "They're building an ad blocker into Chrome?! Ooh yeah????!!! We'll show them!" happened internally. Taking bets on them being out of business or sold at a greatly diminished value in 3 years or less.
  - bubblethink 9y ago
    I wouldn't be so sure. They probably rely significantly on enterprise/university/library subscribers. Journals haven't gone anywhere despite being paid forever. This will also switch to the journal bait and switch model. Show the abstract in google results, but require money to read the full article.
abuani 9y ago
That's a great question: They're still a company that I read articles from every now and then, so I personally assume they're doing well enough to still exist. How did it work out for them? Not trying to be a snarky bastard here, I genuinely want to know how it worked out for them, because I don't know this story and am too lazy to do research on it right now, and given the tone of your comment, I'd imagine it'll be easier for you to provide me some starting material to give me a head start.
- sndean 9y ago
  I'm not who you replied to, but I was genuinely curious too. This is the best evidence I can find [0][1]... It looks like it probably did negatively impact Forbes (and other websites that have blocked adblockers). But if they're sticking with that behavior, maybe it's not so bad? I also saw that their physical magazine readership is up (while other competing magazines are down or flat). [0] https://thestack.com/world/2016/04/21/sites-that-block-adblockers-seem-to-be-suffering/ https://thestack.com/world/2016/04/21/sites-that-block-adblo... [1] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/forbes.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/forbes.com
bubblethink 9y ago
I guess it worked ok for them, given that they are still doing it. I can never open a Forbes link. Not in a 'disable ad blocker pop-up' sort of way, but it just redirects to the home page. Sometimes it would work after a couple of tries. The upshot is that I never open Forbes links any more.
- amyjess 9y ago
  Have you tried uBlock Protector? https://jspenguin2017.github.io/uBlockProtector/ https://jspenguin2017.github.io/uBlockProtector/
  - bubblethink 9y ago
    No, but I use the anti-adblock killer. Is this better ? While it's a good exercise academically, in the long run, I just don't visit sites that block ad-blockers.
    - amyjess 9y ago
      The userscript that accompanies it catches a bunch of things that AAK misses. Ctrl-Fing through the script, I see there's a section specifically for "forbes.com".
workerIbe 9y ago
I don't know how it worked out for them but I will usually disable my adblocker for sites I like that ask nicely and their adds are not too obnoxious.

leggomylibro 9y ago

Makes sense from Google's point of view. You are no longer providing value to our users. You will be quickly replaced with something that provides more value to our users.

revmoo 9y ago
Agreed. Seems simple to me; if you stop providing the content those users are coming for, they stop coming. Why is this hard for NYT to understand?
GhostVII 9y ago
It also makes sense because they can't crawl a page that is behind a paywall.
- 2_listerine_pls 9y ago
  Of course they let in google's crawler.
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    The whole purpose of making a webcrawler for a search engine is that you are crawling the content that a user will see upon clicking a link in search results.
    - 2_listerine_pls 9y ago
      Even if it's behind a paywall, there is benefit in crawling it. For instance, if you happened to be a logged WSJ user, then google could show you the result based on your cookies.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        Googlebot does not crawl the web separately for each user with a copy of that user's credentials borrowed from their browser. Aside from the privacy and security issues, it would require Google to multiply it's search resources by the number of users.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

magic5227 9y ago

As it should. Paywalls present a worse user experience than say Bloomberg.com which shows its content for free.

arjie 9y ago
Bloomberg.com is great at giving you rubbish quickly. The WSJ is better at giving you good information for a fee. Depends on what you want to optimize for, I suppose.
- H4CK3RM4N 9y ago
  Are you really going to argue that Bloomberg, the one which is able to make Bloomberg Terminal[1] a good value proposition, is worse in terms of quality of information than the Washington Post? [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/solution/bloomberg-terminal/ https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/solution/bloomberg-te...
  - arjie 9y ago
    > Are you really going to argue that Bloomberg, the one which is able to make Bloomberg Terminal[1] a good value proposition, is worse in terms of quality of information than the Washington Post? No, because I don't read the Washington Post and I don't see why it's relevant. But yes, I do claim that bloomberg.com is a poor source of news. Bloomberg.com is to the Bloomberg Terminal as the Amazon Fire Phone is to AWS. Sure, the same company makes both, but one is rubbish and the other is something professionals use all the time.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Bloomberg News is subsidized by the terminal business. It's free and public so terminal users can send non-payers links. I guess if you want your news funded entirely by a small group of people in the financial sector, that's fine. But for those of us grateful for the work the Wall Street Journal did to uncover e.g. the Theranos scandal, paying for good journalism is the way to go.

realmcsae 9y ago

There's gotta be a way around this method...maybe letting bots view the whole article.

citizens 9y ago
As far as I know showing different content to different visitors (google bot vs. users) is penalizable.

glitcher 9y ago

This is the tradeoff WSJ opted for, and it really doesn't make sense for it to work both ways. Web crawlers can't index content behind a paywall, end of story. Where WSJ has a big advantage is that they already have brand name recognition. From the stats in the article it appears that this was a profitable choice for them, however, a lesser know content publisher seeking to monetize using paywalls is bound to have a much more significant challenge attracting users without decent search result rankings.

hackcasual 9y ago
They feel google is treating their paywalled content unfairly compared to sites that offer content for free. They want their cake and to eat it too.

Androider 9y ago

If you click a search result and end up seeing something completely different than what you expected based on the search result snippet, it shouldn't matter if you're the WSJ or a scam site trying to hack your Google rank. It's deceiving the user and inflating your search ranking at the expense of more deserving listings.

eropple 9y ago
Yup. We used to call it "cloaking", I don't know if that's still a term in use in the SEO world.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Google still calls it that. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en
  - artursapek 9y ago
    They are known to crawl using human-like user agents instead of the typical Googlebot one precisely to counter this (weak) effort at playing the system. I'm surprised WSJ is surprised by the outcome here.
    - x0x0 9y ago
      They're in no way surprised; they're trying to marshal public outrage or lean on anti-trust efforts in order to force google to rank them higher.
  - mistermann 9y ago
    I wish google would give us somewhere to report sites that are doing this.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      It's here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en It specifically mentions cloaking.

chollida1 9y ago

Watching this very closely, I pay for a WSJ subscription because I think their content is better than most, and also because I get sent alot of links to their content. Something about this later point feels like the argument people make about using Office because people still send them Excel and Word docs. Similar to how software companies release free software to augment what makes them money, Bloomberg is able to spend a lot of money on producing content that is sponsored by their terminal subscriptions. The WSJ might be in a unique situation where their primary audience will pay, often due to companies footing the bill for employee's, so perhaps they can be one of the few news producing companies that doesn't have to depend on Google for traffic in that their primary audience loads up their front page multiple times a day just to see what's there. I wouldn't be surprised if they did a deal with Bloomberg to provide their content on terminals to further strengthen their ties to their core audience.

Simulacra 9y ago
That's a really good point. Maybe the future of news survival is to pair it with a company that makes money, to support the journalism. Then again I feel like that's how we got CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, etc. Maybe not a great idea. I really like Blomberg and to some extent WSJ. I hope they can maintain their integrity.
- austenallred 9y ago
  > Maybe the future of news survival is to pair it with a company that makes money, to support the journalism To be honest, that's the past and present of most news as well. Newspapers would have never been around based on advertising alone. The fee usually paid for printing and sending, and classifieds made up the bulk of the revenue. Now that they're decoupled and both news and classifieds are pretty much free, it's no wonder that news is struggling. Hard news has (almost) never been a wildly profitable endeavor in and of itself.
- zanny 9y ago
  The future of news survival is independent journalists being funded by people who care to have an unbiased investigative news media. No idea how we get there, though. You basically need to persuade those who understand how critical journalism is to freedom to care to fund it, and to have a centralized platform to fund journalism that itself is not corruptible by monied interests trying to push propaganda.

jasonkostempski 9y ago

About a year ago I made myself a little browser plug-in to remove all links to sites I never want to visit again, wsj.com was the first one I added.

jacquesm 9y ago
Could you post the list (and if you're really feeling kind the plug in)? I'd love to add this to my filtering layer. Between Quora and ExpertSexChange I really could do with some more blacklisting of sites that keep baiting me to click.
- vultour 9y ago
  Forbes would be the first one on my list, every time I see that advertisement landing page the quickest Forbes tab closing challenge is on.
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    I think that was my second :) It's in the list for ssure.
- NathanKP 9y ago
  Not sure if this is the OP's extension but I use Personal Blocklist for Chrome.
  - jasonkostempski 9y ago
    Not mine, that only seems to work on Google search results which is rarely the problem I have. Reddit, HN, etc. often link to sites I already know I don't want to go to, my plug-in removes them from there. I copy the list to my RSS client so it filters them out there too.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Best local method is to simply add sites to your local blocklist as you encounter them. For domain-wide blocks: https://pastebin.com/V5fyv3BT https://pastebin.com/V5fyv3BT I also use a set of blocklists for advertising servers: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt hosts1 http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt hosts2 http://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt http://hosts-file.net/ad_servers.txt hosts3 http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/hosts hosts4

jasode 9y ago

>The Journal decided to stop letting people read articles free from Google after discovering nearly 1 million people each month were abusing the three-article limit. They would copy and paste Journal headlines into Google and read the articles for free, then clear their cookies to reset the meter and read more, Watford said. After the harder paywall, what's the best guess of the percentage of those google-copy-pasters will convert[1] to subscribers paying $278 or $296.94 or $308.91 per year? My guess is less than 1/10th of 1%. I assume the vast majority of the 1 million are casual readers who don't have $300 discretionary income to splurge on a subscription. If they can't read for free with a workaround, they'll do without it. In related trivia, I just read that The Economist's strategy is to allow the google-copy-pasters. I'm not judging either company as right. It's interesting they go about it differently. [1] 1 year costs must include full rate to the teaser introductory rates: https://buy.wsj.com/wsjusjune17/ https://buy.wsj.com/wsjusjune17/

i_cant_speel 9y ago
Agreed. I just downloaded an extension so I don't even have to bother with searching Google anymore.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
JoshTriplett 9y ago
> I assume the vast majority of the 1 million are casual readers who don't have $300 discretionary income to splurge on a subscription. Or that the vast majority have much better uses for $300 than paying for a newspaper.
xemdetia 9y ago
I think that's the main thing that is different than my normal relationship with a newspaper. If I see an article that catches my fancy I buy that newspaper, if I don't I don't buy it (or the 'Sunday version'). While the universe would prefer I pay a subscription it's just not how I have ever interacted with a news publishing outfit. I think part of my issue with the wsj complaint here is just trying to go back to the subscriber driven model but I have never worked with them that way. That's what makes that teaser rate even more frustrating- I just would want to pay and not try to make a financial decision or subscription. Can I just pay $5 for a week and not have a dog and pony show around it? I'm not so interested in a particular publication to want to make this kind of commitment.

cornedor 9y ago

I wonder if Google will be very helpful toward WSJ after they convinced a lot of companies to stop advertising on YouTube.

daddyo 9y ago
I also thought this was pretty rich. First broadly attack Google's income, then complain about discrimination when Google ranks your paywalled content lower. Though I trust Google to make a decision based on user satisfaction, not unrelated meta-politics like this: Any website with a paywall should (and probably is) painted with the same brush. WSJ would benefit from pushing the angle that "Google punished us for doing critical journalism".

exelius 9y ago

I reluctantly recognize that in order to have an unbiased press, we need news readers to pay the costs of operating a newspaper. I'm happy to pay for my news, because I want news to be truth, not propaganda. Maybe the moral of the story is that Google News isn't the best source of news -- just the cheapest. Though I do think it would make sense for historical articles (i.e. articles older than some arbitrary time period) should be removed from the paywall so as to be searchable and able to be referenced.

ng12 9y ago
> I'm happy to pay for my news, because I want news to be truth, not propaganda I don't think there's a significant correlation there at all. The NYTimes hawks subscriptions almost as heavily as the WSJ.
- exelius 9y ago
  While the conservative media pundits like to rail against the NYT, it's actually a very reputable news source that fact-checks articles and issues retractions when it is wrong. Sure it's a bit left-leaning in the topics they report on, but they're usually not wrong.
  - actuallyalys 9y ago
    Agreed. I tend to think of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal as being mirror images of each other: they're both reputable and based in NYC [0], but the NYT has a liberal bent and the WSJ has a conservative one. [0]: Being based in the largest city of the east coast gives them a different set of biases, which aren't entirely political.
workerIbe 9y ago
The irony may be that the best way to get paid is to be biased.
- fgonzag 9y ago

0003 9y ago

Missing: links from Facebook increased significantly. (I imagine)

pcl 9y ago
Actually, it's not missing. From the article: The Journal’s ad revenue wasn’t affected by its recent drop in Google traffic because social media visits grew 34 percent in that time, keeping overall web traffic flat, Watford said. The Journal lets readers get some articles for free via social media like Twitter and Facebook, which the paper views as a marketing tool.
- hoschicz 9y ago
  I think that 0003 meant that people circumventing the blocking by appending l.facebook.com/l.php?url= increased in number.
  - 0003 9y ago
    Yes - thanks. :)

workerIbe 9y ago

This is great, for a while it seemed 80% of the top 5's were WSJ, I got really tired of clicking to read a headline and getting the pop up saying something like "Wow, you clicks us a lot, you must like us, how about you pay?", Well no, actually you are just over ranked on so many topics...

NathanKP 9y ago
Yeah I got annoyed for the same reason and used the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension to block WSJ from showing up in my search results at all. And recently I had to add Forbes to the same list.
buxtehude 9y ago
I was annoyed too ... in my case I subscribed.
- workerIbe 9y ago
  Interested, why? For any headline there are several sources, are you willing to pay just to click on the top link?
  - buxtehude 9y ago
    Not all sources are equal in terms of quality and information provided in the linked to article. IMO, in certain areas (financial industry, investigative journalism, international business issues, etc.) WSJ consistently has better coverage than most other sources - so I'm willing to pay for it now that they've made it much harder for me to get to it. I regularly read other sources, and if at some point I feel I'm not getting enough value from WSJ, I'll cancel.

1024core 9y ago

> restricting the rest to its 2.2 million subscribers or people who arrive via social media. So they're fine with people from "social media" getting a 'free ride' ?

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
Many people used Google specifically to get around the newspaper's paywall. I imagine fewer people will use social media to do that. As a result, the fraction of content requests that are honest referrals would be expected to be higher.
- rcraft 9y ago
  You can easily use Twitter search logged out or without an actual Twitter account: https://twitter.com/search-home https://twitter.com/search-home. Not hard to see the same google copy and pasters will just move to Twitter search.
gruez 9y ago
yep, hence why everyone switched to facebook.com/l.php
- gvb 9y ago
  The Journal’s ad revenue wasn’t affected by its recent drop in Google traffic because social media visits grew 34 percent in that time, keeping overall web traffic flat, Watford said. Their numbers agree with your hypothesis: people simply switched from using the (now closed) Google "payhole" to the social media "payhole."
  - amenod 9y ago
    ... which must hurt Google. Well played, WSJ, well played. :)

AngeloAnolin 9y ago

I think WSJ is wrong in saying that they are being punished by Google for their paywalled articles appearing last in search results. Google has algorithms that would need to actually crawl the entire content, to ensure that it will provide the most relevant result. If it is unable to crawl the entire content, then it becomes just as hard to rank the same in the result. Changing the algorithms to rank simply on the title and the first few (free introductory) paragraphs of articles behind paid subscription can lead to more bogus results. Google knows that invalid search results in turn disengages their users from perusing their search engine.

27182818284 9y ago

This submission's headline left out the other part of the opening sentence After blocking Google users from reading free articles in February, the Wall Street Journal’s subscription business soared So their views of free folks fell while paid subscriptions rose. I would think those subscriptions would be worth it, but as the article mentions "...argue that Google’s policy is unfairly punishing them" Personally, I would think that the subscribers would make it more worth it. Afterall, I ended up adding components on to my NYTimes subscription and often forget that I pay monthly for it because it isn't that expensive compared to, say, home Internet and such.

rory096 9y ago

Note that the Twitter workaround still works: https://t.co/2t073JIAWe https://t.co/2t073JIAWe https://www.wsj.com/articles/british-police-identify-london-attackers-as-may-calls-for-crackdown-on-extremists-1496663010 https://www.wsj.com/articles/british-police-identify-london-... Just append site:twitter.com to your Google search, click through, and voila.

CptJamesCook 9y ago
Can you explain this in more depth? I can't make it work. Thanks
- jshevek 9y ago
  I believe they are saying: if you find the tweet announcing the article, you can click through from the tweet and view the article.
aoeusnth1 9y ago
This doesn't work for me. Do I need javascript enabled for it to work?
- calcifer 9y ago
  Yes you do, unfortunately. I had to allow scripts for t.co in NoScript for it to work.
curiousgal 9y ago
Confirmed. Clicking on any article from @wsj Twitter feed works.
NelsonMinar 9y ago
WSJ also still serves articles to folks coming from Facebook. There's a Chrome extension to redirect all WSJ URLs through Facebook to bypass the paywall, works for now.
- 9y ago

gnicholas 9y ago

My startup is about to launch a partnership with the Wall Street Journal that will give our users free, un-paywalled access to the WSJ site. If you want to join our beta, which is ongoing, sign up at www.ReadAcrossTheAisle.com. The beta is free, and our app is free as well. Hopefully this is relevant/useful for folks in this thread.

breck 9y ago

Maybe there's an opportunity for a coalition of sources (WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg, WP, et cetera), to get together with a SE like DuckDuckGo and allow deeper search integration in some type of paid membership plan.

mnm1 9y ago

Good. These articles should be discriminated against by Google and ranked on the second page at best. They are worthless. Without the subscription, the whole site is worthless. Google is just reflecting that. WSJ has no right to complain. If they don't like it, they should make their content not be worthless. Pretty damn simple solution but it seems they prefer to whine instead. If these idiots haven't yet understood the market for online content, it's pretty hopeless anyway. People don't want to pay money for content online, they will only pay with their privacy and personal data. There is enough content to fill up millions, maybe billions of lifetimes. What part of the supply / demand equation does the WSJ not get? Google is a search engine for finding information on the Internet, not their personal ad agency. When people search for news, they want to find news, not some paywall. How is it Google's duty to hurt their own business so they can show what are essentially foreign ads it makes no money on (nothing more, nothing less) to its users?

speby 9y ago
Yep, this is the same sort of bullshit that Sexpertsexchange (experts-exchange.com) used to to do. They performed "cloaking" that let the searching index the entire page of content and then when regular users visited the site, they threw up the paywall. WSJ (and of course expecting to continue to rank well behind a paywall) is really just more of the same thing.
- H1Supreme 9y ago
  Quickly stopped going to that site shortly after all that. I assume they lost tons of traffic that way.

DanielBMarkham 9y ago

This is going to sound cold, but we need to have an honest chat here. I would like a way never to see another WSJ or Forbes article on the internet. I understand their need for profit, and I applaud them trying various things. They might be the best thing since sliced bread. I applaud a free press. They have a solid reputation, and I wish them the best. However, I'm never going to pay. Ever. So I don't need to see their ads, I don't need to follow-through on Google clicks. I just need them to disappear from my internet experience completely. If you're going to run a paywall, I would like to never be exposed to your brand name or the fact you have content online. There are simply too many of you and too little minutes of concentration that I have to offer. If one day I see a physical copy of one of these publications and decide to subscribe? That might be a lot of fun. But for now, don't waste any of my brain cells showing me stuff I'm never going to consume. Worse yet, leading me down some garden path only to be ambushed at the end with a paywall. Life's short. Your publications are not an important part of mine. I think part of the problem here was conflating the fact that X number of people clicked through with the assumption that somehow these were paying customers just freeloading (see the title of the article). That was never the case.

dsr_ 9y ago
There are browser extensions which will remove links for you based on domains. BlockSite is one.
dredmorbius 9y ago
Dnsmasq on your local router, or (with an appropriately capable system) localhost does just this. address=/wsj.com/0.0.0.0 Will null-route all of the Wall Street Journal. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/b2ungqjvmlflvinrtp4cug https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/b2ungqjvmlflvinrtp4cug I've got an extended blockset now that includes a number of whole domains, mostly hardwired in. Including all of outbrain at taboola.

AKluge 9y ago

I wonder how careful they were to distinguish between someone who cleared their cookies, and two people behind a nat. It's possible that the number of people abusing their system was smaller than they think.

cft 9y ago

It allows to read with FB referrers. On desktop Chrome, use Referrer control extension with facebook.com http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-the-wsj-paywall/ http://www.jongales.com/blog/2014/02/13/how-to-get-around-th... On mobile, make a private FB post visible only to yourself.

mudil 9y ago

Google touts itself as a company that wants to catalog all the knowledge. How is it possible that WSJ content ranking falls after the introduction of the pay wall? Google has the ability to crawl behind the wall content, and yet it downgrades the WSJ content. In my opinion, this is an abuse of its search dominance position.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Google touts itself as a company that wants to catalog all the knowledge. How is it possible that WSJ content ranking falls after the introduction of the pay wall? Because ranking is about utility to search users, and content not accessible to general search users isn't useful to them. The knowledge (both the content itself and the meta-data regarding it's inaccessible status) is still cataloged, this is just making effective use of the meta-data for the purposes of search UX.
- buxtehude 9y ago
  But what if you do subscribe? Shouldn't those results filter up again? Google knows I subscribe (the information is in my gmail account).
  - GuB-42 9y ago
    It is a difficult problem. Google may know you are subscribed but it doesn't know what the page looks like to you. It only knows its own version of the page. What Google sees is that many people go to WSJ because their search query matches the content of the googlebot version of the page, and then bounce back as they hit the paywall. Google may not even know about the paywall. It just sees that because many users bounce back, they must be unsatisfied, and derank accordingly. Now, it still has a workaround. If you are logged in, it tracks your personal habits. And if it sees you are staying on WSJ, it may uprank it specifically for you. Again, it is just a matter of staying on the site or not, google doesn't really care about your subscription.
Flenser 9y ago
> Google has the ability to crawl behind the wall content I thought they weren't. How does that work? Do they have a login for WSJ? That would benefit WSJ as an incumbent news provider at the expense of startups too new or small to get special treatment from Google.

bpchaps 9y ago

@damn - Could you followup on your comment that you might disallow WSJ if they ever did this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13620821

snarfy 9y ago

"You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site.” That's not discrimination.

charonn0 9y ago
It is discrimination, but not all discrimination is bad.

yjgyhj 9y ago

Online Adverts are a form of micropayment. It's currently the only way to charge sub-cent amounts from users. It requires the third party of an advertiser, which is a very expensive middle man. If we can figure out how to do micropayments without users needing an account somewhere (like PayPal), we can get rid of ads. That is the ultimate solution to this long-winding conflict between users, advertisers and content creators.

aeorgnoieang 9y ago
> how to do micropayments without users needing an account somewhere That doesn't seem possible. What does even a hand-wavy sketch of this look like to you? I'd guess it's possible without, e.g. a unique row in a single (tho perhaps distributed) database table for each user, but I can't imagine it really being different than an 'account' either, e.g. a Bitcoin 'wallet'.

mwexler 9y ago

This sounds a lot like the Net Neutrality argument: All content should be treated as equal, whether it's pay or not, whether it's powered or supplied by the search engine/ISP or not. Is there harm in ranking good content appropriately high (if relevant to the search) if it's clear that there is a cost to access it? Could Google just sigil "paid content" with a $ or € or whatnot?

fav_collector 9y ago
It depends on what you mean by 'content'. If content is what non subscribers see, then the content would be low quality.
speby 9y ago
Maybe but that means the search engine had access to the article's contents "for free" and therefore has a copy of that content in its index. If I am not also able to access that content the same way the search engine does (aka ... for free as an anonymous or not-logged-in user), that makes it a lot less appealing.

majani 9y ago

Sounds like something that can be solved using special metadata for paywall sites, along with a process to approve those who claim to be paywall sites.

meow_mix 9y ago

This "discrimination" is by design, they should quit crying

m-p-3 9y ago

The decided to put their content behind a paywall, which makes the data needed to sort it accurately in the search results unavailable. You can't have your cake and eat it too, WSJ.

thetruthseeker1 9y ago

This is free market capitalism that Rupert Murdoch's company Fox News promotes. Google News fundamentally improved the online content publication system by making it cheaper to its consumers. Earlier, there were too many news companies whose content didn't necessarily have an edge over some other news agency's and they charged money (which worked in an age where no internet existed), and google has fundamentally squeezed some of them including WSJ. If the differentiating quality was present, more people might have been willing to pay for WSJ. When Harrison Ford made cars, lots of businesses who built business around the inefficient means of transport (i.e the horse) like providing fodder for horses, and blacksmiths who were building horse shoes or the ones building horse carts got squeezed. Same here. Internet and google has removed an inefficiency in the news system. They need to adapt and provide a differentiating quality, else they will perish - The principle of free market capitalism. If WSJ needs google to behave a certain way so that it can make more money, that is not free market capitalism.

cheez 9y ago
I think you meant Henry Ford
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- thetruthseeker1 9y ago
  Yes, thank you!

eddyg 9y ago

Thank goodness there's one good use for AMP pages then, right? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14389986

Medaber 9y ago

I'm not sure if this will hurt the paid subscription model. I pay for WSJ. People who want to rely on "free" news deserve the news they get. While their google traffic may decrease, they may end up getting more paid subscribers.

angry_octet 9y ago

Aptly demonstrates the effects of Trump think. A complete ignorance of network effects, the belief effect in decision making.

edem 9y ago

Why would I pay for their articles when they are no better than the free alternatives? This is the same as Quora vs StackOverflow. Not only the latter is vastly superior it is also free.

jkchu 9y ago
Quora is free as well. It just requires you to create an account to view all answers.

shaunol 9y ago

WSJ is discriminating against Google's user-base by blocking content that Google presumed the user would have access to. Yet WSJ thinks they're the ones being discriminated against. As WSJ is finding, Google will not even bother attempting to index, sort and recommend content that is unavailable to 99.999% of its user base. It's nice that they're supposedly better off, or at least the same off, without high Google results. Though I doubt this will stop them from endlessly attempting to game the system.

Jimmie_Rustle 9y ago

“You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site.” Jesus fucking christ, what a sentence. 'Google-bot can't index our pay-walled articles... DISCRIMINATION!!!' fuck wsj, seriously

gumby 9y ago

I loved this at the end of the article: > “Tech companies are always going to do what’s in the interest of their business,” As opposed to what businesses? Jeez, talk about a sense of priviledge.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dangayle 9y ago

A time machine is the only solution. As a web developer for a family-owned newspaper who recently removed our failure of a metered-paywall, the only solution I've been able to come up with is a time machine that sends a killer robot back to 1995/1996 and remove the incompetents industry wide who decided to give away their expensive to produce content for free.

fourthark 9y ago

I find that the WSJ abstracts are usually enough - I'm just clicking to find out what was behind the bait.

NN88 9y ago

Not a lot of support here for information. This stuff isn't free.

Merovius 9y ago

As a user, if I search for something, I want to get the information I was searching for, not an offer to buy that information. A link to a page where I can buy your product is not a search result; it's an ad. And it's totally fair (and possible) for WSJ to be required to pay for their ads on Googles result page, just like everybody else is doing. (Disclaimer: Working for Google)

tzs 9y ago
As a user, if I search for something, I want to be told where it can be found. How to retrieve it once I know its location is a separate and independent problem. A search engine that excludes sources that will require pay to get the information is a much less useful search engine to me, because it has no idea if the information is important enough to me that I will pay to get it if no free source is available.

bipr0 9y ago

Its is not fair to charge for your content and get ranked high up in SERP, especially for those who survives on AdSense and other ad networks.

reacweb 9y ago

I read often WSJ articles for free on internet. This gives me a good opinion of their articles. When I travel in train or plane, I often buy a physical newspaper. I may favour WSJ because of this good opinion. IMHO, blocking "free" readers will not increase paying customers on the long run and may arm also their physical newspaper. Reputation is something that takes long to earn and that can be lost very quickly. RIP WSJ

Ensorceled 9y ago

I wish there was some kind of "account sharing" with the media companies. I have a Globe and Mail and a New York Times subscription because I want to support journalism. But then there is The Guardian, The Toronto Star, WSJ, ... I'd happily pay $200 for a mega-subscription that went to a bunch of them.

aeorgnoieang 9y ago
$200 a month? Because an annual WSJ subscription is ~$300 alone.
- Ensorceled 9y ago
  Yes, an month. Both NYT and G&M are monthly subs. i.e. I'm willing to pay $2400 a year for journalism.
kelukelugames 9y ago
Sounds like a start up idea. People can share their netflix account for someone with an extra NYT account. :P

timwaagh 9y ago

this is why some sites (foreignpolicy.com) use client side paywalls. most users don't know how to disable them, but google will rank you highly.

runeks 9y ago

How about sites with paywalls signal this, including subscription price, in a HTTP header (or whatever) to crawler bots? Then Google users would be able to filter by "free results only" or "paid results, less than $x/month". Seems like a relevant search criterion, especially for industry-specific articles (like finance).

blcArmadillo 9y ago

So if I understood this correctly their paid subscriptions increased 30% and their overall online traffic hasn't really been affected because people can still get the content through social media. If my understanding is correct then it seems this was a smart business move by the WSJ who is able to stand on their own reputation instead of relying on people finding their content through a third party.

KiDD 9y ago

I just stopped reading WSJ... I tend to close any page that opens up to something other than what I was expecting to see.