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

Megalith

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Back in February, the Wall Street Journal pulled out of Google’s "First Click Free" program, which allowed Google searchers to access some news content without a paywall barrier. While the WSJ benefited with a fourfold increase in the rate of visitors converting into paying customers, there was a catch: Google traffic plummeted 44 percent, as the search company’s algorithms and bots would only see limited portions of articles and rank them lower. Now they're accusing Google of discriminating against paid news sites.

“Any site like ours automatically doesn’t get the visibility in search that a free site would,” Suzi Watford, the Journal’s chief marketing officer, said in an interview. “You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site.” The Journal’s experience could have implications across the news industry, where publishers are relying more on convincing readers to pay for their articles because tech giants like Google and Facebook are vacuuming up the lion’s share of online advertising. The Journal’s owner, News Corp., competes with Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, in providing financial news and information.
 
Google is a business wanting to deliver the best experience to its users. Leading them to a pay article when searching something would understandably be a detrimental experience. The fault (which is really just a 'hey, this is just the way the cookie crumbles' circumstance) is completely on the pay website for being a pay website IMO.
 
Google is a business wanting to deliver the best experience to its users. Leading them to a pay article when searching something would understandably be a detrimental experience. The fault (which is really just a 'hey, this is just the way the cookie crumbles' circumstance) is completely on the pay website for being a pay website IMO.

Yeah, I can't see how they fail to see the irony. They're complaining about how their content isn't easily accessible solely because of restrictions created by their own paywall. Remove the paywall, host ads like 99% of the rest of the internet, problem solved.
 
"Your crawler only crawls over the part we're gonna show to your users! How dare you only put THAT part of our article into your results! Wahhh!"
The Journal’s parent company, News Corp., has a tense history with Google. In 2009, Murdoch accused Google of stealing articles and threatened to pull his company’s stories from its search results.

"We're so angry with you being so open that you'll lead people to others who steal our stories that we're just going to block ourselves off from you entirely so they'll NEVER get to the source article!"
 
Reminds me of the European publishers who got angry at Google.

They lost views too.

The capitalist cheerleader WSJ can't see the irony in its inability to adapt to a changing market.
 
"Old media doesn't understand new media."

The song remains the same.
 
After the Journal’s free articles went behind a paywall, Google’s bot only saw the first few paragraphs and started ranking them lower, limiting the Journal’s viewership.

So, you played yourself? Google took literally no action here?

They're making more money and they still complain.
 
Payback maybe for the WSJ's war against YouTube.
 
Who cares. WSJ is an opinion rag now. Edward R Murrow is spinning in his grave.
 
Google is a business wanting to deliver the best experience to its users. .


I dont know whether to laugh or cry at this. I now have a button in the middle of my Android device that does nothing. Well more accurately, it does one thing, it asks if i want to turn on Google Assistant, offering a choice of yes or no. There is no way to re-assign that button. Best user experience my ass. A proper UI would allow you t remap that button to something useful, instead of offering a non-choice.

TLDR -
Google shows and leads you where they want you to be, not necessarily where you wanted to go. You are not their customer, you are their product.
 
I close any website that forces me into paid content regardless of how badly I'm interested in the information because there are a dozen other sites 1 click away with either the exact same content or a similar quality of it.
 
I dont know whether to laugh or cry at this. I now have a button in the middle of my Android device that does nothing. Well more accurately, it does one thing, it asks if i want to turn on Google Assistant, offering a choice of yes or no. There is no way to re-assign that button. Best user experience my ass. A proper UI would allow you t remap that button to something useful, instead of offering a non-choice.

TLDR -
Google shows and leads you where they want you to be, not necessarily where you wanted to go. You are not their customer, you are their product.

If a Google user is the product Google sells, then Google still needs to deliver a pleasurable experience to that user so they stick around, so that Google still has something to sell; correct? Can't sell users if no users are using your service. Nothing you said contradicts my original statement in anyway.
 
I dont know whether to laugh or cry at this. I now have a button in the middle of my Android device that does nothing. Well more accurately, it does one thing, it asks if i want to turn on Google Assistant, offering a choice of yes or no. There is no way to re-assign that button. Best user experience my ass. A proper UI would allow you t remap that button to something useful, instead of offering a non-choice.

TLDR -
Google shows and leads you where they want you to be, not necessarily where you wanted to go. You are not their customer, you are their product.

So your middle button does NOTHING. Why lie to people who are techies? Android is the most customizable phone OS and IF the middle button doesn't do ANYTHING, you can make to do something.
 
From the article:
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.
I find that 1 million number very hard to swallow. It is much easier to just search the topic and find another reputable website without a paywall to get your news from.
 
I dont know whether to laugh or cry at this. I now have a button in the middle of my Android device that does nothing. Well more accurately, it does one thing, it asks if i want to turn on Google Assistant, offering a choice of yes or no. There is no way to re-assign that button. Best user experience my ass. A proper UI would allow you t remap that button to something useful, instead of offering a non-choice.

TLDR -
Google shows and leads you where they want you to be, not necessarily where you wanted to go. You are not their customer, you are their product.

That makes no sense, there are only a few phones that even have physical buttons that can't be remapped (camera and the LOVERLY AMAZING Bixby button), but for a soft button? If it's the big 'G' in the Pixel Launcher, use a different launcher, because yea, Google would direct you towards their service when you're using their software, that's just good sense. If you're not capable of doing even the easiest of things, why should they make it complex?
 
Ok smart people, how do i remap the long press on the middle (home) button to an arbitrary action? The only rules are you cannot suggest an app and rooting is also disallowed as it breaks functions of the phone. (most notably anything DRM related, like banking). This function should be in the OS itself, you know the thing that is supposed to provide a malleable abstraction layer between the user and the hardware.
 
Google should discriminate against paid news sites. No one wants the links that they click on in their search results to be hitting them up for money. Google doesn't owe anything to the WSJ.


OH But they DO !!! at least goes the thinking behind the big news outlets who occasionally raise a stink about google(actually any search engine) linking to news stories off their web pages . they feel they should get paid for all those clicks from those links !!

this pretty much been overshadowed by all the fake news hype lately but this article clearly shows the thinking is still there.
 
Google is a business wanting to deliver the best experience to its users.

Well, no. Google's business is to agregate as much data about you as they can to sell it to advertisers who are Google's real users and the users experience they actually care about.
 
Well, no. Google's business is to agregate as much data about you as they can to sell it to advertisers who are Google's real users and the users experience they actually care about.

If a Google user is the product Google sells, then Google still needs to deliver a pleasurable experience to that user so they stick around, so that Google still has something to sell; correct? Can't sell users if no users are using your service. Nothing you said contradicts my original statement in anyway.

Already been addressed ^
 
Short story - if you're behind a paywall or give me shit about my ad blockers then I'll get the same info somewhere else.
Yeah...but not really. Most of the WSJ material taht's behind a paywall is exclusive to them. Your argument holds more weight if it's a paper that mostly uses syndicated content. Now maybe you don't care about that, and that's fine, but there are only a few great papers in this country and WSJ is one of them.

That said, I don't think it makes much sense for Google to return results for articles that you can't read. At most, I'd say they could have an option to turn on results for content behind a paywall, but I'm not sure who'd want that, other than people who have a subscription to the WSJ (or other subscription only articles...see much of the Washington post's content)
 
If they want their product advertised on google, they just need to setup an AdWords account like everyone else, then people can click over and decide to make a purchase. Just with catchy news worthy keywords, 'Trump' is probably a good one.
 
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