I’ve been spending lots of time speaking with colleagues, entrepreneurs, and media executives about digital business models over the past several months. It’s a hot topic in today’s macroeconomic climate as the ad model continues to struggle. I’ve written other posts about “free to paid” digital business models addressing many of the details of how to think through that challenge. I’ve also written about whether you should build an iPhone app and how much you should charge for your iPhone App. Both looking at hard data to determine the most optimal iPhone App development and monetization strategy.
The reality is (as of today) many content businesses are struggling as the old media models are no longer relevant. Every day we read the news and another property is cut, consolidated, or sold for pieces. At the same time, Google releases impressive Q3 2009 earnings and proposes an “open” micropayments platform to NAA to solve the industry business model challenge, “how to charge for content.” It’s an extension of Google Checkout with a vision for a “premium content ecosystem.” More options for publishers to monetize their content is good, yet Google has lots of competitor vs. partner issues with publishers so adoption will likely become challenging. Also, where is PayPal in this?
For content owners that have decided to put some or all of their content behind a paid wall the question becomes, “how will customers find me if Google can’t crawl the ’subscription-only’ content?”
This is a good question that I often get asked.
The simple answer is – yes there is a solution, yet the devil is in the implementation details as you want to be careful not to frustrate potential customers coming from a Google search.
First, in order for Google to index your content behind a paid (subscription) wall the Google (and Bing, etc.) crawler must be allowed to access that content. These crawlers are currently not sophisticated enough to fill out registration forms, support cookies, etc. The suggested way is to have your technical folks configure your webserver NOT to serve the registration page when the request is made by the Google crawler (User-Agent is “Googlebot.”) Also, have your technical folks make sure your robots.txt file allows access to Google and other crwalers.
In layman terms, Google (and Bing, etc.) all personally identify themselves when crawling your pages. If some simple technical changes are made on your site to identify the search engines, they can be allowed behind your paid wall to appropriately index your content.
Second, the next concern you should be thinking about is user experience. You may frustrate your customers if they click on a Google search result with the expectation of FREE access to your content and then get hit with the paid wall. Many content publishers use content abstracts or snippets to alleviate these concerns. Basically, a small portion of that content is available for free. If the user decides they want more they can entertain the proposed payment options.
Third, there are two other Google options to entertain. Google offers a “first click free” option where the very first article a users clicks on (identifiable by the referrer) doesn’t require a subscription. In other words, a user coming from a Google search results page can gain unobstructed access to the first article, yet all other articles or links on the page are “trapped” so no access without registration/payment. The technical implementation of this should be rather straightforward for your technical folks.
For Google News publishers, Google offers the option to mark their content “Subscription Only” by adding a ’subscription tag’ to the publication name. So, customers searching for content in Google News can see (prior to clicking) that the content is “subscription only.”
