Google- Paid for Content Worth the Price?

According to The Times, publishers of paid-for web content will now be able to restrict viewers’ free internet access under concessions made by Google, the world’s biggest search engine.

The US giant said that publishers would now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google.

The move follows claims from some media companies, including Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, parent company of The Times, that the search engine is profiting from online news provided by newspaper groups.

The Google “First Click Free” programme has, until now, allowed users to read any story on newspaper websites, including content that is subscription only, provided they search through.

Now users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages.
“Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free,” Josh Cohen, Google’s senior business product manager, said. “Now, we’ve updated the programme so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing.”

Google users may start seeing registration pages appear when they click for a sixth time on any given day at websites of publishers using the program, according to Mr Cohen.

Similar moves have been made by other press bodies-regional publisher Johnston Press has recently began to charge for content across six of its sites as rival publisher Trinity Mirror admitted it would not rule out a pay wall.
Pay walls were introduced across six Johnston Press titles, including the Whitby Gazette, the Northumberland Gazette and the Worksop Guardian, Johnston Press has confirmed. Users are charged £5 for a three-month subscription to access content beyond the home page across the sites.

The news comes after Rupert Murdoch, the big cheese of the publishing world, called for support from the media industry for his crusade to get consumers to pay to read newspaper content online. The changes to the media landscape are not limited to the UK, as Murdoch announced his proposals speaking to the US Federal Trade Commission’s two-day workshop on journalism in the internet age. In the UK Murdoch’s interests span media as diverse as the Times and the News of the World. He insists that professional journalism was an expensive commodity, which people should not expect to be free.

Murdoch homed in the message that “the future of journalism belongs to the bold” and that “the old business model based on advertising-only is dead”.

According to  New Media Age, Murdoch is set to trial his paid-for online content model in the UK early next year, introducing paywalls on the Times that will include 24-hour passes to the site in addition to a subscription model.
Murdoch said publishers need to “do a better job of persuading consumers that high-quality reliable news and information does not come for free”. He said that news needs to be delivered in a format that users wanted to engage with.

Murdoch added, “There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purpose without contributing a penny to its production. Content creators bear all the costs, while aggregators enjoy many of the benefits. In the long term, this is untenable.”

Is Murdoch right? Or is the idea of paid for content completely against the whole concept of the internet, the idea of freedom and ease of information it embodies? The Wall Street Journal charges for content, but for those of us simply wanting to scan the headlines, are Google and Murdoch taking things a step too far?

Let us know your thoughts!