Seems a good idea.How readers are going to react is to be seen?
LONDON (Reuters) – Google is offering news publishers a way to attract paying subscribers without having to remove their content from Google News search results, after some media companies accused it of profiting from their online news.
The Web search giant said it would adapt its so-called First Click Free program to prompt online readers to register or subscribe to a news provider’s site after reading five free articles from that publisher in a day.
Previously, the user’s first click on any article would be free for an unlimited number of articles, provided the user did not click through any more links from any article.
Google said the update would allow publishers to focus on potential subscribers who were accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis. Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen said: “As newspapers consider charging for access to their online content, some publishers have asked: should we put up pay walls or keep our articles in Google news and Google search?”
“In fact they can do both — the two aren’t mutually exclusive,” he wrote on Google News’s official blog (googlenewsblog.blogspot.com).
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE5B11W420091202
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