Weekly Blog II

This week I read a news from last year says that Google updates the payment policy for the online reading to protect the authors’ rights.

At first, the online newspaper has many advantages comparing with the print in the paper edition. For the online newspaper, editors do not need to care about the space, they could just post the stories on the website. Besides, the newspaper in social media could be posted at any time when the publisher wants. The social media news is not like the print newspaper, which needs a medium- paper to send information. Then some websites began charging readers for access to the news pages.

On October 2nd, Google proclaimed that they would abolish the “First click free” policy to ensure the publishers’ rights. Readers need to pay for access to online articles in some social media. But there is an easy way to avoid the payment is that just plug keywords into Google, and then readers could access the website and read it without any charges, which is called the “First click free” policy. This behavior is disadvantaged the publisher’s benefits. However, if the publisher does not follow the “First click free” policy, Google would like to punish them, which is arranging their rank of the searching results in the last. Google claimed that the new “flexible sampling” program would be instead of the “First click free” policy. Google would help publishers to make readers become the subscribers, and also they would index all articles from the publishers from social media without any limits.

Moreover, Google suggests that publishers in social media could provide 10 articles for free to users in a month, which is similar to how New York Times did in 2014. During that time, Times allowed users access to ten article for free monthly. Overall, readers have the choice of willing to pay the paywall or not, but the publishers have the right to charge readers for the newspaper in the social media.