Google News Limits the 'First Click Free' Program to Just Five Clicks

The whole news publishers versus Google debacle keeps on going and, for the most part, Google is sitting on the sidelines. Once in a while it responds, indirectly, to the accusations by underlining the benefits it provides news sources. And to show that it's not completely deaf to the criticism, Google is now changing the way the First Click Free program works by allowing news outlets to limit its use to just five clicks.

“[W]e've updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing. If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day,” Josh Cohen, senior business product manager at Google wrote.

Through the program, users coming from Google News or the search engine are able to view articles that are otherwise behind a paywall. Google implemented the program as a way for paid content websites to get around the company's policies against 'cloaking', the practice of feeding the crawler a version of the page and the users a different one. It's obvious why Google doesn't like this, but it posed a problem for publishers who wanted their content indexed in full while still requiring users to pay for it.

With First Click Free, the users will see the content in full, just like the search engine, but only the page they found through News or search. However, the system is open to abuse and readers could potentially access a significant portion of the content by using the Google services. Now Google allows publishers to implement a limit, preventing users from accessing more than five pages per day through the system. “We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis,” Cohen wrote.

This should settle one of the biggest concerns for the publishers though, in reality, the problem was mostly one of perception rather than an actual phenomenon. Very few people would go through the trouble of searching Google News for every article a publication may have just to read the entire site. For the most part, users would read an article or two, which they wouldn't have read if they hadn't found it through the search, and then move on. This makes the change somewhat of a win-win situation, the newspapers get what they want and the users aren't really affected by the limit.