The Beeb

In my experience (looking at our web filter logs) the majority of people use the BBC. Not Google, not any of NI's sites or any other news site. Indeed the beeb get more hits than all other news sites put together.

I think Google are playing a game with Murdoch and his charged content buddies.

"Google is letting the publishers decide how many clicks make five? What if they cheat, what happens? Does that maybe depend on who cheats, and does that maybe mean there's wiggle-room?"

If some sites cheat and some sites decide not to require registration then I'm pretty sure people will tend to move towards the sites that remain free of charge and registration. Once the Google directed traffic dries up I'm sure NI and their allies will have a quick rethink.

Murdoch's thinking is flawed. He clearly thinks that if he gets a certain number of visitors for free content then he will continue to get that many visitors when he charges. In effect he seems to believe X fee visits per day will amount to £X of revenue at £1 per visit. How wrong he is. Many other people have made that mistake before him. As has already been proved when you start to charge for a previously free web site your traffic almost dries up over night.

Murdoch also needs to learn that if he wants to share the license fee with Aunty he will have to stop charging for content and stop all advertising. That is part of the agreement that the licence fee payers have with the BBC. That will mean no more sky subscriptions and no more advertising revenue. Bet it won't seem as attractive to him then.

Ok...

It looks like Google are taking this seriously then. This is a typical response from a large company when presented with a potential regulation of their activities. Supermarkets and the food industry have been a classic example with food labeling (they chose their own, before having one forced upon them).

I see another dot com bubble type effect

people will consume content for free that they will never pay for and will move to another free provider rather than pay anything at all.

It's a sham, but...

Google is just doing this so it looks "nicer" to the various government regulators that are taking a long look at the power it holds.

stop wasting our time on this issue

Dear Mr Murdoch would you just go ahead and have one of your minions properly fill out robots.txt and STFU already.

thx,

Teh Internets

Bollocks, this is WSJ's problem, not Google's.

So following the instructions from the Silicon Alley Insider, I was able to find a story that if I attempt to view from within the WSJ website, I see a preview of but that if I attempt to view from a Google search, I see the whole thing (hosted on wsj.com with an identical URL).

So obviously the WSJ are analysing referrers or tracking cookies or something to determine where clicks into story pages originate and serving either the cut down or full version accordingly. If they're too dumb to turn that off and only show full stories to authenticated, paid-up users *and* Google's crawlers (hence still getting the traffic from Google News) then that's their own problem, not Google's.

We need a Stupid Murdoch icon.

"Do no evil"?

From the Silicon Insider comments, in response to the instructions on how to get WSJ articles for free:

"Sue on Jun 1, 12:22 PM said:

Nick, you're a true sleaze.

My father was laid off from the WSJ 4 months ago, we've moved from our modest 3bedroom home to small 2 room place, and my parents are always fighting now.

Let businesses try to figure their model out without helping the general public steal from them. In the end, it hurts real people no matter how harmless you think your post may be. "