Google's New 5 Click Free Rule for Content Ads

Google has decided to limit sampling of paid content on publishers' sites -- to five free clicks daily per user. Well, actually, it's given publishers the option to do so.

Publishers who charge for content will find that Google has changed the parameters of its First Click Free program. The changes, published on Google's blog Tuesday, come after News Corp's Rupert Murdoch threatened to remove content from Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and other sites in Google search results. Reports also floated around online that he would pay Microsoft to exclusively index content. The issues are related to the fact that Google makes money from other publisher's content.

In the previous incarnation of First Click Free, users who accessed a particular article from a publisher's paid content through Google had to be allowed to read the entire piece. Non-subscribers would therefore use Google to get around pay walls. Now publishers can choose to limit that access further, to only five free clicks a day.

Google suggests the update protects the typical person from cloaking -- "the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines," according to its definition -- while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis.

To see the rest of the article and analysis of how it will affect advertising & content, please see the whole article on MediaPost