Early this year, the Wall Street Journal decided they were losing money by letting users access content behind their subscription paywall through Google’s “First Click Free” program. With their full content hidden from the open web, WSJ content fell in search rankings, and traffic from Google fell 44%. But at the same time, their subscription conversions increased by fourfold. This news undermined Google’s assertion of the benefit of providing users with a limited amount of free content on a daily basis, without the frustration of encountering subscription paywalls. On October 2, Google announced it was ending FCF in favor of “flexible sampling,” where publishers will be able to determine how much–if any–free content they will provide. (Google recommends 10 free articles per month.) Google is also looking at ways it can leverage what it knows about users, and streamlining the subscription process.
- Driving the future of digital subscriptions [The Keyword | Richard Gingras] “‘Try before you buy’ underlines what many publishers already know—they need to provide some form of free sampling to be successful on the internet. If it’s too little, then fewer users will click on links to that content or share it, which could have an effect on brand discovery and subsequently may affect traffic over time.”
- Google Could Do More To Help Journalism [Fortune | Adam Lashinsky] “There’s a catch, of course. More than one. Google hopes to get between publishers and their customers and also to take a cut of the action for its troubles. Were Google serious about helping the news business it could forgo the commission altogether and prejudice its search algorithm in favor of subscriptions–on the theory that a publisher asking for money must be proud of its offering and therefore likely is offering something good.”
- Google: First Click Free is over, being replaced by Flexible Sampling [Search Engine Land | Greg Sterling] “Gingras said Google is going to use ad-targeting tactics to identify which audiences are most likely to subscribe. […] He added that different offers and content might be shown to different audiences based on a ‘propensity to pay’ or subscribe.”
- Google’s latest move means you actually have to pay for news [Wired | Bonnie Christian] “Google’s announcement has come hot on the heels of Facebook’s own decision to give a helping hand to publishers. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced it would cooperate by adding subscriptions to Instant Articles. ‘If people subscribe after seeing news stories on Facebook, the money will go directly publishers who work hard to uncover the truth, and Facebook won’t take a cut,’ he wrote.”
From the Ohio Web Library:
- Optimizing a Menu of Multiformat Subscription Plans for Ad-Supported Media Platforms. (Journal Of Marketing, March 2017, pp. 45-63 | Vamsi Kanuri, Murali Mantrala, and Esther Thorson)
- A Shared Mission. (Editor & Publisher, Mar. 2016, pp. 24-25 | Matt DiRienzo)
- Paying for what was free: lessons from the New York Times paywall. (Cyberpsychology, Behavior And Social Networking, December 2012, p682-687 | Jonathan Cook and Shahzeen Attari)
