10/03/2017

Google Loosens Policies on News Paywalls

The search giant says it’ll change its “First Click Free” policy

The search giant says it will change its “First Click Free” policy, which has been controversial with publishers, in favor of an alternative that allows publishers more flexibility in how users access paywalled content through Google’s search engine.

If your organization’s magazine or publication is behind a paywall, you might be frustrated by the way Google has traditionally handled access to your restricted content.

The reason: the company’s “First Click Free” policy, which allows users who click on an article that’s behind a paywall to view the whole thing—whether they’re subscribers or not—as many as three times per day, as long as the click originally came from Google. Websites that did not agree to allow this were shut out of traffic from the world’s most-used search engine.

Please click here to read the complete article from Associations Now.