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After blocking Google users from reading free articles in February, the Wall Street Journal’s subscription business soared, with a fourfold increase in the rate of visitors converting into paying customers. But there was a trade-off: Traffic from Google plummeted 44 per cent.
The reason: Google search results are based on an algorithm that scans the internet for free content. After the Journal’s free articles went behind a paywall, Google’s bot only saw the first few paragraphs and started ranking them lower, limiting the Journal’s viewership.
Executives at the Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, argue that Google’s policy is unfairly punishing them for trying to attract more digital subscribers. They want Google to treat their articles equally in search rankings, despite being behind a paywall.
“Any site like ours automatically doesn’t get the visibility in search that a free site would,” Suzi Watford, the Journal’s chief marketing officer, said in an interview. “You are definitely being discriminated against as a paid news site.”
The Journal’s experience could have implications across the news industry, where publishers are relying more on convincing readers to pay for their articles because tech giants like Google and Facebook are vacuuming up the lion’s share of online advertising.
The Journal’s owner, News Corp, competes with Bloomberg , the parent company of Bloomberg News, in providing financial news and information.
With Google, publishers try to strike a balance. While they may want to sign up more subscribers by not giving away free articles, they also don’t want their content to drop in search results, which drives traffic to their sites and can boost advertising sales. For that reason, many outlets with subscription businesses — like the New York Times and Financial Times — let Google users read at least one free article so they still rank high in search results.
