7 ms·

Google CEO Appeases Publishers with Subscriptions

40 points by uladzislau 9y ago

B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
"Google is now pledging to index all subscription news outlets in search, let publishers determine how many articles to provide free through the search engine, and will not demote them in results if they have little or no free content." Very useful, indexing inaccessible content.
- veidr 9y ago
  I almost agreed with your comment, then I re-read it and decided you are being sarcastic. But it is very useful, in contexts in which you are searching for things that are important to you and in which you want to have a fuller sense of what information is available, even if it may cost money. It might not improve the casual news-reading experience, but if it's something important like learning about your child's illness, researching a prospective new employer, or something like that... it's a lot better to know what articles and stories exist on the topic, even if they might cost money to read, rather than having no idea those pieces relevant to your search even exist.
  - arkades 9y ago
    These aren't mutually exclusive. PubMed solved this ages ago: if it was freely available, it was tagged accordingly, and you could filter your search results that way. If this were meant to benefit users, it would be an optional filter at the discretion of the user, not a built-in "feature" of the algo.
    - veidr 9y ago
      I agree. That would be awesome, but probably beyond what we can expect an ad company to do as part of its mission to sell ads. But they might do it if they thought doing so would cause more people to use their their search engine more, thereby generating more ad clicks. I know I probably would, but otoh I’m probably not their target demo (since I only click about 7 ads per year, usually after coming home drunk from some event).
      - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
        "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." (https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/ https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/ according to Google search today, although I can't see that text in the throng of large images.) Needs tweaked, that 'universally' is now melting away. Must be the water heating up, as the frog didn't say. Croak.
- arrrg 9y ago
  It’s not inaccessible, it’s just not free.
  - dazc 9y ago
    I subscribed to The times in the UK for a trial period. On the website I experienced the same level of AdSense type ads as I did with most other free alternatives. I was under the impression, before signing up, that I was paying to avoid this? And, as for cancelling, let's just say they don't make it easy. My opinion, for what it's worth, is that traditional publishers will continue to commit suicide no matter what Google do.
    - diminish 9y ago
      Actually most people assume they'll avoid being tracked or being spammed with ads after they pay for a subscription. They underestimate the desire for more revenues.
    - Angostura 9y ago
      I believe the Times is behind a soft paywall - you only have access to a limited number of articles, free.
Pyxl101 9y ago
This is a disappointing decision. As a user, I don't want Google to rank page content for me based on something other than what I'll see when I visit the page. With this system, presumably, Google sees one thing (the actual article) while I will see something else (a useless paywall): bait and switch. When I search the World Wide Web, I'm not trying to find content within private walled gardens. It's fine if Google wants to add support for ranking paywall-restricted pages, but those results should only show up for people who have a subscription at the website, and not for everyone else who doesn't. This would be easy to implement: the publisher sets a cookie with Google on each user who has access. Only users with a cookie will see restricted articles in their search results by default. You could further improve the search experience by allowing users to set a preference determining whether they want to see restricted content in their search results for which they don't have a subscription. To be fair, the previous policy requiring three free articles per day was probably excessively deleterious for subscription websites. That's probably more than 95% of casual users will ever read. I think there's a better middle ground in here somewhere. Most of the time, I want to filter websites out of my search results if I don't have the ability to read the article right now.
- xbmcuser 9y ago
  Google should give the user the option to hide paywall articles
  - NavekM 9y ago
    Google should give the user the option to include paywalled articles.
    - smegel 9y ago
      Can't have one without the other.
- veidr 9y ago
  Hmm. I myself definitely want to see relevant articles from publications I haven't subscribed to (and maybe haven't even heard of) when I search for things. I would, however, appreciate it if the search engine clearly marked such results, though, so I could know before clicking whether something was behind a paywall.
SquareWheel 9y ago
Original source: https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/driving-future-digital-subscriptions/ https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/driving-futur...
tryingagainbro 9y ago
More than 42 percent of U.S. digital ad revenue in 2017 will go to Google The rest is arranging chairs on Titanic... My guess is that number will only go up, making things much worst.
- blauditore 9y ago
  I guess other big domain-specific players, such as Facebook or Twitter, are not in huge danger. But direct competitors are probably fighting a losing battle.
Pyxl101 9y ago
I wonder if this will have an impact on combating fake news. I would suspect that few people would pay subscriptions for fake news, so there probably isn't a lot of that out there. On the other hand, legitimate journalistic content is far more likely to require a subscription. Perhaps this policy change is, in addition to appeasing publishers, part of Google's broader initiatives to promote journalistic reporting and combat fake news.
- hueving 9y ago
  It will only help with some classes of fake news. I'm sure people will still happily pay for news that lies to match their biases. They already do that right now with which free sites they choose to visit as their 'trusted news sources'.
- astura 9y ago
  Fake news is spread through social media, not Googled.
  - Pyxl101 9y ago
    I'd probably agree that seems to be how it's most widely shared. But note that Google did announce in Feb 2017 that they're changed their algorithm to combat fake news: > Google announced changes to its search algorithm Tuesday that will combat the dissemination of "fake news" and conspiracy theories through new ways to report inaccurate information. > The technology giant will change its search rankings to "help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content," a company executive said in a blog post. This feature aims to prevent issues like the Holocaust denial results that Google saw in December — which placed an article from a neo-Nazi white supremacist website at the top of search results. http://fortune.com/2017/04/25/google-search-algorithm-fake-news/ http://fortune.com/2017/04/25/google-search-algorithm-fake-n... Original source: https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-improvements-search/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-i...
- rovek 9y ago
  I would suggest a lot of fake news is sparked by a headline and an article that goes largely unread.
noncoml 9y ago
We need more good search engines.
- Haydos585x2 9y ago
  I've recently made the switch to DuckDuckGo and have been pretty happy. Anything I'm missing I just use !g but DDG is only going to get better!
  - clydethefrog 9y ago
    !s is the better option, Searchpage is Google results without tracking.
    - tortasaur 9y ago
      It's startpage, not searchpage.
- nothrabannosir 9y ago
  Agreed. I’ve been trying bing as my default for two weeks now and it’s actually quite ok. Give it a shot; it has definitely improved. Enough for ~80% of searches.
  - noncoml 9y ago
    Well, I am afraid of the monster Google can become, but not enough to start using MS.
ComodoHacker 9y ago
This solution is far from ideal. In the majority of cases, publishers would be selling access to a single article for a price of subscription. What we need for a healthy content market, is perhaps a micropayment system.
- chmars 9y ago
  I think we need more flat rates, Readly is a great example IMHO: https://global.readly.com/en https://global.readly.com/en For 10 € / month, you get a virtual newsstand with magazines from all over the world.
  - mrmondo 9y ago
    Sounded interesting but it looks like they’ve disallowed Australians from signing up.
    - pls2halp 9y ago
      That terrible. We really need access to things like this too with the News Corp/Murdoch stranglehold on he media(seriously, almost every paper looks something like this come election: http://www.jonstribling.com/wp-content/uploads/20140131-204222.jpg http://www.jonstribling.com/wp-content/uploads/20140131-2042...)
    - reacweb 9y ago
      geolocalisation is censure. It should never be accepted as a good practice.
      - mrmondo 9y ago
        Indeed, it’d be nice if there was a way to spoof your location without connecting to an offshore VPN (or a DNS proxy in some cases) but we just don’t seem to be there yet.
    - SyneRyder 9y ago
      I think Google might be working on something. When I visited an Australian Fairfax newspaper yesterday (WA Today), I got a prompt inviting me to 'subscribe' to the newspaper via Google Contributor, which I was able to do. They're charging 1c per page view for an ad-free experience. I think I only got the prompt because they detected I was using an ad-blocker though. I'm not sure it's open to everyone yet.
chatmasta 9y ago
The AMP end game begins to materialize.
- arkades 9y ago
  How does this relate to AMP?
  - chatmasta 9y ago
    AMP onboards the publishers onto Google's platform and effectively holds their content for ransom. Makes it easy to implement revenue sharing on advertisements or subscriptions, especially when all AMP ads must be "approved" and "compatible." Watch, the next move from Google will be a paywall subscription service for publishers with 30% revshare to Google and some kind of unified subscription management and/or bundling for users. Or before that maybe we'll even see "AMP for desktop".
    - nolok 9y ago
      The only way I can consider that you're not vastly over exaggerating for no reason is if you do not understand what ransom means.
      - chatmasta 9y ago
        You're a publisher. Google takes your content. They host it on their server, behind their domain name. If you want it back, you can forego implementing AMP. But good luck with that, because your content will rank behind the dozens of other publishers who do comply.
    - sounds 9y ago
      Share less, find your strongest point, stick with it. Less is more here: "Google will use AMP to implement a revenue-sharing system with publishers." That seems like a plausible step for Google to use to counter ad blocking.
mcintyre1994 9y ago
Are there any public lists of who has all their articles locked behind paywalls? It'd be good to have an addon to mark all these links if there's no way to read any I'm not paying for any more.
libeclipse 9y ago
Well fuck.
andy_ppp 9y ago
There would be no way this would fly if Google wasn’t a monopoly. If I was the government I’d spit them into two competitors and we’d all benefit from and expansion of possible ideas. It’d be good for Google too.
muse900 9y ago
Google, facebook etc are not services anymore. They are necessities to everyday life. They should have been regulated already to the point where they'd turn non-profit. (Like wikipedia) We are not talking about businesses anymore, we are talking about necessities in life that have the monopoly to do whatever they want and change people's lives around. Btw I am using duckduckgo, its results are quite good compared to what it was 2 years go. I don't miss google and its 2-5 ad's per search. Thing is I don't see duckduckgo overcoming google at any point, as for the normal everyday person google is just a searchgod and thats it. An everyday normal guy can't understand the implications to his privacy by google,fb etc getting data off him/her. So he/she won't change to something else, until is forced to.
- 2OEH8eoCRo 9y ago
  What implications are there to using Google?
- gbacon 9y ago
  So is Google a necessity, as you assert in your first paragraph, or isn’t it, as you demonstrate in the last?
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Google is something you choose to use for a user. But Google is a necessary infrastructure for businesses and developers, as they can't not use Google, due to the market share it has. Google also uses their power in one market to affect other markets, and grow further. This, again, is monopolistic action. Try going a week without using Google, fine. Try running a major website a week without being listed on Google?
- kuschku 9y ago
  Correct, Google has become basic infrastructure, and should be a nonprofit entity, or governmentally owned. You can't run a website without being listed on Google, that's where the matket dominance comes in. And this shouldn't be true. You should always have a choice between what company you interact with, or, if it's a monopoly, it should be governed democratically (so usually owned by the state).
throw2016 9y ago
It's suprising anti-monopoly laws have not kicked in yet. The is no point in having laws if they are not going to be applied. Maybe it's in the governments immediate interest to not rein in a global stalker vacuuming up the world's personal information to have access but paying lip service fundamentally undermines and discredits your own principles and governance systems. Giving in to temporary expedience is a losing end game as other governments will inevitably take action to protect their citizens data. Democracy and capitalism only work if you do what it says on the tin, or you will have to resort to increasingly undemocratic methods to hold on ie bullying, bribing and doing deals with other countries not to take action. Ultimately citizens everywhere lose. Absolute power corrupts helping build more monopolies and its in Google's and its own employees interests that they are split up. Search, Youtube, Maps and Android come to mind.

40 points by uladzislau 9y ago

"Google is now pledging to index all subscription news outlets in search, let publishers determine how many articles to provide free through the search engine, and will not demote them in results if they have little or no free content." Very useful, indexing inaccessible content.

veidr 9y ago
I almost agreed with your comment, then I re-read it and decided you are being sarcastic. But it is very useful, in contexts in which you are searching for things that are important to you and in which you want to have a fuller sense of what information is available, even if it may cost money. It might not improve the casual news-reading experience, but if it's something important like learning about your child's illness, researching a prospective new employer, or something like that... it's a lot better to know what articles and stories exist on the topic, even if they might cost money to read, rather than having no idea those pieces relevant to your search even exist.
- arkades 9y ago
  These aren't mutually exclusive. PubMed solved this ages ago: if it was freely available, it was tagged accordingly, and you could filter your search results that way. If this were meant to benefit users, it would be an optional filter at the discretion of the user, not a built-in "feature" of the algo.
  - veidr 9y ago
    I agree. That would be awesome, but probably beyond what we can expect an ad company to do as part of its mission to sell ads. But they might do it if they thought doing so would cause more people to use their their search engine more, thereby generating more ad clicks. I know I probably would, but otoh I’m probably not their target demo (since I only click about 7 ads per year, usually after coming home drunk from some event).
    - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
      "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." (https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/ https://www.google.com/intl/en/about/ according to Google search today, although I can't see that text in the throng of large images.) Needs tweaked, that 'universally' is now melting away. Must be the water heating up, as the frog didn't say. Croak.
arrrg 9y ago
It’s not inaccessible, it’s just not free.
- dazc 9y ago
  I subscribed to The times in the UK for a trial period. On the website I experienced the same level of AdSense type ads as I did with most other free alternatives. I was under the impression, before signing up, that I was paying to avoid this? And, as for cancelling, let's just say they don't make it easy. My opinion, for what it's worth, is that traditional publishers will continue to commit suicide no matter what Google do.
  - diminish 9y ago
    Actually most people assume they'll avoid being tracked or being spammed with ads after they pay for a subscription. They underestimate the desire for more revenues.
  - Angostura 9y ago
    I believe the Times is behind a soft paywall - you only have access to a limited number of articles, free.

Pyxl101 9y ago

This is a disappointing decision. As a user, I don't want Google to rank page content for me based on something other than what I'll see when I visit the page. With this system, presumably, Google sees one thing (the actual article) while I will see something else (a useless paywall): bait and switch. When I search the World Wide Web, I'm not trying to find content within private walled gardens. It's fine if Google wants to add support for ranking paywall-restricted pages, but those results should only show up for people who have a subscription at the website, and not for everyone else who doesn't. This would be easy to implement: the publisher sets a cookie with Google on each user who has access. Only users with a cookie will see restricted articles in their search results by default. You could further improve the search experience by allowing users to set a preference determining whether they want to see restricted content in their search results for which they don't have a subscription. To be fair, the previous policy requiring three free articles per day was probably excessively deleterious for subscription websites. That's probably more than 95% of casual users will ever read. I think there's a better middle ground in here somewhere. Most of the time, I want to filter websites out of my search results if I don't have the ability to read the article right now.

xbmcuser 9y ago
Google should give the user the option to hide paywall articles
- NavekM 9y ago
  Google should give the user the option to include paywalled articles.
  - smegel 9y ago
    Can't have one without the other.
veidr 9y ago
Hmm. I myself definitely want to see relevant articles from publications I haven't subscribed to (and maybe haven't even heard of) when I search for things. I would, however, appreciate it if the search engine clearly marked such results, though, so I could know before clicking whether something was behind a paywall.

SquareWheel 9y ago

Original source: https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/driving-future-digital-subscriptions/ https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/driving-futur...

tryingagainbro 9y ago

More than 42 percent of U.S. digital ad revenue in 2017 will go to Google The rest is arranging chairs on Titanic... My guess is that number will only go up, making things much worst.

blauditore 9y ago
I guess other big domain-specific players, such as Facebook or Twitter, are not in huge danger. But direct competitors are probably fighting a losing battle.

Pyxl101 9y ago

I wonder if this will have an impact on combating fake news. I would suspect that few people would pay subscriptions for fake news, so there probably isn't a lot of that out there. On the other hand, legitimate journalistic content is far more likely to require a subscription. Perhaps this policy change is, in addition to appeasing publishers, part of Google's broader initiatives to promote journalistic reporting and combat fake news.

hueving 9y ago
It will only help with some classes of fake news. I'm sure people will still happily pay for news that lies to match their biases. They already do that right now with which free sites they choose to visit as their 'trusted news sources'.
astura 9y ago
Fake news is spread through social media, not Googled.
- Pyxl101 9y ago
  I'd probably agree that seems to be how it's most widely shared. But note that Google did announce in Feb 2017 that they're changed their algorithm to combat fake news: > Google announced changes to its search algorithm Tuesday that will combat the dissemination of "fake news" and conspiracy theories through new ways to report inaccurate information. > The technology giant will change its search rankings to "help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content," a company executive said in a blog post. This feature aims to prevent issues like the Holocaust denial results that Google saw in December — which placed an article from a neo-Nazi white supremacist website at the top of search results. http://fortune.com/2017/04/25/google-search-algorithm-fake-news/ http://fortune.com/2017/04/25/google-search-algorithm-fake-n... Original source: https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-improvements-search/ https://www.blog.google/products/search/our-latest-quality-i...
rovek 9y ago
I would suggest a lot of fake news is sparked by a headline and an article that goes largely unread.

noncoml 9y ago

We need more good search engines.

Haydos585x2 9y ago
I've recently made the switch to DuckDuckGo and have been pretty happy. Anything I'm missing I just use !g but DDG is only going to get better!
- clydethefrog 9y ago
  !s is the better option, Searchpage is Google results without tracking.
  - tortasaur 9y ago
    It's startpage, not searchpage.
nothrabannosir 9y ago
Agreed. I’ve been trying bing as my default for two weeks now and it’s actually quite ok. Give it a shot; it has definitely improved. Enough for ~80% of searches.
- noncoml 9y ago
  Well, I am afraid of the monster Google can become, but not enough to start using MS.

ComodoHacker 9y ago

This solution is far from ideal. In the majority of cases, publishers would be selling access to a single article for a price of subscription. What we need for a healthy content market, is perhaps a micropayment system.

chmars 9y ago
I think we need more flat rates, Readly is a great example IMHO: https://global.readly.com/en https://global.readly.com/en For 10 € / month, you get a virtual newsstand with magazines from all over the world.
- mrmondo 9y ago
  Sounded interesting but it looks like they’ve disallowed Australians from signing up.
  - pls2halp 9y ago
    That terrible. We really need access to things like this too with the News Corp/Murdoch stranglehold on he media(seriously, almost every paper looks something like this come election: http://www.jonstribling.com/wp-content/uploads/20140131-204222.jpg http://www.jonstribling.com/wp-content/uploads/20140131-2042...)
  - reacweb 9y ago
    geolocalisation is censure. It should never be accepted as a good practice.
    - mrmondo 9y ago
      Indeed, it’d be nice if there was a way to spoof your location without connecting to an offshore VPN (or a DNS proxy in some cases) but we just don’t seem to be there yet.
  - SyneRyder 9y ago
    I think Google might be working on something. When I visited an Australian Fairfax newspaper yesterday (WA Today), I got a prompt inviting me to 'subscribe' to the newspaper via Google Contributor, which I was able to do. They're charging 1c per page view for an ad-free experience. I think I only got the prompt because they detected I was using an ad-blocker though. I'm not sure it's open to everyone yet.

chatmasta 9y ago

The AMP end game begins to materialize.

arkades 9y ago
How does this relate to AMP?
- chatmasta 9y ago
  AMP onboards the publishers onto Google's platform and effectively holds their content for ransom. Makes it easy to implement revenue sharing on advertisements or subscriptions, especially when all AMP ads must be "approved" and "compatible." Watch, the next move from Google will be a paywall subscription service for publishers with 30% revshare to Google and some kind of unified subscription management and/or bundling for users. Or before that maybe we'll even see "AMP for desktop".
  - nolok 9y ago
    The only way I can consider that you're not vastly over exaggerating for no reason is if you do not understand what ransom means.
    - chatmasta 9y ago
      You're a publisher. Google takes your content. They host it on their server, behind their domain name. If you want it back, you can forego implementing AMP. But good luck with that, because your content will rank behind the dozens of other publishers who do comply.
  - sounds 9y ago
    Share less, find your strongest point, stick with it. Less is more here: "Google will use AMP to implement a revenue-sharing system with publishers." That seems like a plausible step for Google to use to counter ad blocking.

mcintyre1994 9y ago

Are there any public lists of who has all their articles locked behind paywalls? It'd be good to have an addon to mark all these links if there's no way to read any I'm not paying for any more.

libeclipse 9y ago

Well fuck.

andy_ppp 9y ago

There would be no way this would fly if Google wasn’t a monopoly. If I was the government I’d spit them into two competitors and we’d all benefit from and expansion of possible ideas. It’d be good for Google too.

muse900 9y ago

Google, facebook etc are not services anymore. They are necessities to everyday life. They should have been regulated already to the point where they'd turn non-profit. (Like wikipedia) We are not talking about businesses anymore, we are talking about necessities in life that have the monopoly to do whatever they want and change people's lives around. Btw I am using duckduckgo, its results are quite good compared to what it was 2 years go. I don't miss google and its 2-5 ad's per search. Thing is I don't see duckduckgo overcoming google at any point, as for the normal everyday person google is just a searchgod and thats it. An everyday normal guy can't understand the implications to his privacy by google,fb etc getting data off him/her. So he/she won't change to something else, until is forced to.

2OEH8eoCRo 9y ago
What implications are there to using Google?
gbacon 9y ago
So is Google a necessity, as you assert in your first paragraph, or isn’t it, as you demonstrate in the last?
- kuschku 9y ago
  Google is something you choose to use for a user. But Google is a necessary infrastructure for businesses and developers, as they can't not use Google, due to the market share it has. Google also uses their power in one market to affect other markets, and grow further. This, again, is monopolistic action. Try going a week without using Google, fine. Try running a major website a week without being listed on Google?
kuschku 9y ago
Correct, Google has become basic infrastructure, and should be a nonprofit entity, or governmentally owned. You can't run a website without being listed on Google, that's where the matket dominance comes in. And this shouldn't be true. You should always have a choice between what company you interact with, or, if it's a monopoly, it should be governed democratically (so usually owned by the state).

throw2016 9y ago

It's suprising anti-monopoly laws have not kicked in yet. The is no point in having laws if they are not going to be applied. Maybe it's in the governments immediate interest to not rein in a global stalker vacuuming up the world's personal information to have access but paying lip service fundamentally undermines and discredits your own principles and governance systems. Giving in to temporary expedience is a losing end game as other governments will inevitably take action to protect their citizens data. Democracy and capitalism only work if you do what it says on the tin, or you will have to resort to increasingly undemocratic methods to hold on ie bullying, bribing and doing deals with other countries not to take action. Ultimately citizens everywhere lose. Absolute power corrupts helping build more monopolies and its in Google's and its own employees interests that they are split up. Search, Youtube, Maps and Android come to mind.