Google Ditches First Click Free Policy, Aims to Support Subscriptions

Years back if you wanted to read something online, you just Googled it and then read away. Just about all online content was free. When the advertising industry started to cut back on ad rates some of the big news publishers out there like the New York Times decided to put their content behind a paywall. These paywalls are something we all know today where if you go to the website directly you are hit with a subscription offering to access the item you want to read or perhaps the first few paragraphs of a story before a subscription prompt is seen.

The workaround for many who only wanted to read one story and not subscribe was that you could Google the headline and find it via Google in its entirety most of the time. That workaround is now ending as Google has replaced its First Click Free policy with what it calls Flexible Sampling.

Google says that the publishers are in the best position to decide what level of free sampling works for their websites. While the First Click Free policy required publishers to have a minimum of three free articles per day via Google Search and Google News before the reader was hit with a paywall, Flexible Sampling will not require that. The publisher will be able to determine if readers can view any stories for free before being hit with a paywall.

Google will roll out tools to help support these publications landing subscriptions. These tools will help to streamline the subscription process and make it easier for readers to subscribe. Google also says that if the subscriber has a Google account it could pre-populate many of the fields required to subscribe. This means that users of Google Search and Google News are more likely to find part of an article or none of the article available when they click something that looks interesting in search.