Google has just announced a series of measures with which it seeks to support the media that offer a paid subscription. Through an entry in your blog, they detail the changes that will make effective to favor these publications.

For starters, Google emphasizes that people use their platform to access “this type of high-quality content, and our job is to help them find them.” They say that people are increasingly “used to paying for access to news”, although they also criticize that it can become difficult to subscribe to such media:

“Sometimes the process to subscribe to these services is so complicated that it can be discouraging.”

Goodbye to the ‘First Click Free’

The company states that they have “spoken with the news editors to offer them support in their subscriptions”. The first important step they have decided to implement is to end the ‘First Click Free’, a policy that required publishers to offer a minimum of three articles a day for free through Google News and Google Search.

In this way, they will give way to the ‘ Flexible Sampling’ service, giving the opportunity to the editors to “determine the level of free samples that best suits their needs”.

That means that Google leaves it up to the media to decide how many free daily articles they want to distribute for free on their platforms. It will be their responsibility to decide on a strategy that will help them gain subscribers.

This has been one of the main points of confrontation between Google and some media. For example, The Wall Street Journal did not agree with this measure and decided to stop using it. This caused their visits to fall by 44% , since their content was not being indexed nor was it visible in the search results.

In addition, Google has ensured that in the coming months will be available “a range of products and services designed to help news editors reach new audiences.” In this way, it will seek to support these platforms to make the subscription process easier.

“We also examined the simplification of the entire purchase process to facilitate the subscription and access to such content on the various platforms, our goal is to facilitate subscriptions in all places and for all people.”

Finally, they have also pointed out the ability to use automatic learning algorithms to find potential subscribers, providing the appropriate offer at the “best moment”.