Google offers online news compromise

Google offered publishers a way to attract paying subscribers without having to remove their content from Google News search results, after Rupert Murdoch and others accused it of profiting from their news.

The web search giant said it would adapt its so-called First Click Free programme 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' official blog.

John Ridding, chief executive of the Financial Times, welcomed Google's move but told Reuters it would not alter FT's strategy, which currently makes readers buy subscriptions if they want to read more than 10 FT stories per month.

The Financial Times, owned by British media group Pearson, recently removed its stories from Google News web search results, a move Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has also been reported to be considering.

"I would regard this as a move in the right direction," Ridding told the Reuters Global Media Summit, but said FT would continue to pursue its own strategy – which it can afford to do thanks to its niche global audience for financial news.

"We've always been very determined that we should have a paid-for model that works for us independent of what the aggregators or anybody else is doing in the industry or in the market," he told the London leg of the summit.