Google Changes The Game For Publishers

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, December 3, 2009 Leave a comment

Just yesterday, Rupert Murdoch threw another stone at Google. But before Murdoch had cocked back his hand to throw, Google had announced a solution that should make Murdoch happy, though it probably won’t.

There are two aspects of Google’s announcement that are important to both publishers and to searchers:

1. Google has expanded its First Click Free program to allow publishers to allow up to five clicks free per day for any user who accesses its protected pages from Google. More on that here.
2. Google will index preview pages, but list them in its index as “subscription” to warn users that all they will see is a preview of an article, but that they will need to subscribe in order to read the entire article.

Personally, I think Murdoch is just beating the war drums to draw out other disgruntled publishers so that he can persuade them (or coerce them) into joining him in a class action lawsuit against Google in an attempt to wrangle out some payment for Google indexing his content. So I really don’t think he’s interested in Google’s policies.

But here’s how Google’s policy helps Murdoch (and you if you are a publisher):

• No. 1, publishers can blog the Googlebot from crawling their sites and now allow Google to index it, but that would search suicide.
• Since Murdoch is concerned about subscribers, allowing searchers free access to a limited number of articles on his website allows those subscribers to preview his content to see if it is something they want to pay for; if Murdoch is any good at marketing, he’ll see the opportunity and convert some of that free traffic into paid subscriptions.
• Allowing searchers access to article previews while protecting whole articles behind pay walls should increase Murdoch’s subscriptions (again, if he is any good at marketing) while keeping his sites listed in Google where they can gain access to the traffic.

Rupert Murdoch is smart enough (or should be) to know that no business can survive without traffic – online or off line. Therefore, driving traffic to a website is a very important task. Since Google is the biggest referrer of traffic for most websites, it makes sense to be listed there.

For all you publishers out there, Google isn’t the enemy. You need to learn how to use Google to get the traffic you want and learn how to convert that traffic into subscription (or monetize it in some other way).

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