The whole news publishers versus Google debacle keeps on going and, for the most part, Google is sitting on the sidelines. Once in a while it responds, indirectly, to the accusations by underlining the benefits it provides news sources. And to show that it’s not completely deaf to the criticism, Google is now changing the way the First Click Free program works by allowing news outlets to limit its use to just five clicks.
“[W]e’ve updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing. If you’re a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you’ve clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day,” Josh Cohen, senior business product manager at Google wrote.
Through the program, users coming from Google News or the search engine are able to view articles that are otherwise behind a paywall. Google implemented the program as a way for paid content websites to get around the company’s policies against ‘cloaking’, the practice of feeding the crawler a version of the page and the users a different one. It’s obvious why Google doesn’t like this, but it posed a problem for publishers who wanted their content indexed … (read more)