Publications participating in First Click Free should present content without any barriers. So why doesn't it always happen?
News publishers often want to be listed in Google. News publishers also often want to have paywalls or registration barriers. The good news is Google has rules that allow for this. The bad news is that Google routinely fails to enforce these rules. Below, a case study involving content in a major publication authored by Google’s own executive chairman, Eric Schmidt.
I was doing a search today and came across a news story that looked of interest:
When I clicked on the story — a letter that Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt wrote to the Financial Times addressing the EU’s anti-trust investigation of his company — the text initially loaded and then was replaced with a barrier:
In order to read the entire article, I either needed to take a short survey or register for free. The survey, ironically, is powered by the Google Consumer Surveys program, where publishers earn money by displaying surveys on behalf of others.
I shouldn’t have had to do either thing, take the survey or register to read the article. That’s because Google has — supposedly — some pretty strict rules as part of its “First Click Free” program which requires publishers to show the article without any such barriers, if those publishers want to be listed in Google without some type of disclaimer.
The Rules Of First Click Free
The First Click Free program is very specific. If you want to participate — to be listed in Google or Google News — you have to let people in without any barrier to reading, unless you want some type of disclaimer next to your listing. To quote the guidelines:
First click free: We’ve worked with subscription-based news services to arrange that the very first article seen by a Google News user (identifiable by referrer) doesn’t require a subscription. Although this first article can be seen without subscribing, any further clicks on the article page will prompt the user to log-in or subscribe to the news site….
It is possible to limit the number of free articles that a Google News reader can access via First Click Free. A user coming from the domain [*.google.*] must be able to see a minimum of 5 articles per day. This practice is described as “metering” the user: when the user has clicked on too many of a publisher’s articles from Google News, the meter for freely accessible articles on that site is exhausted. If your site meters access on a weekly or monthly basis, you are still responsible for showing a minimum of five articles per day to Google users. Otherwise, your site will be treated as a subscription site.
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