Distribute and Be Damned 61
this, the search engine had only crawled and indexed pages that were
available publicly, but as its search bots were increasingly being blocked
by paywalls that were being established, it affected Google’s efficacy
as a search engine and thus its business model. When faced with this
conflict of interests, media producers were now forced to make a choice.
Essentially, publishers had to offer up to three articles per day for free
before users encountered a paywall if they wished to improve their
rankings in the search engine. Unsurprisingly, as publishers sought to
monetise their content online, this policy was almost universally hated,
and yet such was the power of Google that they generally had to comply if they wished to attract readers. Axel Springer SE and News Corp
had described it as “toxic”, with Robert Thompson, Chief Executive
of News Corp observing that “if you don’t sign up for ‘first click free,’
you virtually disappear from a search.”
81
The Wall Street Journal was
one of the first to boycott the feature in February 2017 and by October,
shortly before Ritson’s warning of the dangers of the duopoly, Google
had replaced “first click free” with another policy that allowed greater
flexibility to publishers who were seeking to implement paywalls. The
backlash had been growing for some time, however. Originally, the purpose of FCF had been, ostensibly, to improve the “user experience”, but
major publishers began to impose their own limits of articles – typically
half a dozen or so free articles a month that were technically in breach
of Google’s guidelines. As we shall see in a later chapter, however, the
search behemoth found itself in a bind: to enforce its own strictures and
degrade search engine results for mainstream media publications seems
to have contributed, at least in part, to a rise in fake news websites. The
power of distribution was threatening to completely distort the potential
for content creation, whereby a blog in Macedonia – which did not care
a damn about paywalls as a small group of users relied entirely on advertising for revenue – could outstrip the major journalism sites in every
country at least for a short time.
Google announced its replacement of FCF as a process of “enabling
more high quality content for users”, observing in a blog post that:
Over the past year, we have worked with publishers to investigate
the effects of FCF on user satisfaction and on the sustainability of
the publishing ecosystem. We found that while FCF is a reasonable
sampling model, publishers are in a better position to determine
what specific sampling strategy works best for them.
82
While a number of commentators remarked that this is a useful first step
in rectifying Google’s dominance of the market for the distribution of
news, it still presents two problems for publishers. The first, as noted by
Ritson, as well as Moore and Tambini, is that a decade of “first click
free” has conditioned readers to receive free content, at precisely that
this, the search engine had only crawled and indexed pages that were
available publicly, but as its search bots were increasingly being blocked
by paywalls that were being established, it affected Google’s efficacy
as a search engine and thus its business model. When faced with this
conflict of interests, media producers were now forced to make a choice.
Essentially, publishers had to offer up to three articles per day for free
before users encountered a paywall if they wished to improve their
rankings in the search engine. Unsurprisingly, as publishers sought to
monetise their content online, this policy was almost universally hated,
and yet such was the power of Google that they generally had to comply if they wished to attract readers. Axel Springer SE and News Corp
had described it as “toxic”, with Robert Thompson, Chief Executive
of News Corp observing that “if you don’t sign up for ‘first click free,’
you virtually disappear from a search.”
81
The Wall Street Journal was
one of the first to boycott the feature in February 2017 and by October,
shortly before Ritson’s warning of the dangers of the duopoly, Google
had replaced “first click free” with another policy that allowed greater
flexibility to publishers who were seeking to implement paywalls. The
backlash had been growing for some time, however. Originally, the purpose of FCF had been, ostensibly, to improve the “user experience”, but
major publishers began to impose their own limits of articles – typically
half a dozen or so free articles a month that were technically in breach
of Google’s guidelines. As we shall see in a later chapter, however, the
search behemoth found itself in a bind: to enforce its own strictures and
degrade search engine results for mainstream media publications seems
to have contributed, at least in part, to a rise in fake news websites. The
power of distribution was threatening to completely distort the potential
for content creation, whereby a blog in Macedonia – which did not care
a damn about paywalls as a small group of users relied entirely on advertising for revenue – could outstrip the major journalism sites in every
country at least for a short time.
Google announced its replacement of FCF as a process of “enabling
more high quality content for users”, observing in a blog post that:
Over the past year, we have worked with publishers to investigate
the effects of FCF on user satisfaction and on the sustainability of
the publishing ecosystem. We found that while FCF is a reasonable
sampling model, publishers are in a better position to determine
what specific sampling strategy works best for them.
82
While a number of commentators remarked that this is a useful first step
in rectifying Google’s dominance of the market for the distribution of
news, it still presents two problems for publishers. The first, as noted by
Ritson, as well as Moore and Tambini, is that a decade of “first click
free” has conditioned readers to receive free content, at precisely that