Why Google News Should Drop Paid Subscription Feeds
Posted by jonathan at 7:52am EST on 09/02/2007
Recently, I’ve been trying out some new ways to stay informed of upcoming and current news. Particularly this time, I setup some new alerts for specific keywords to help me stay more informed about certain niche parts of the technology industry. It’s been working great so far.
It has indeed been working great, but I found a problem. Google News feeds from all sorts of different sites. Both paid subscription news and free news sources.
Why should Google News drop paid sources?
The answer is simple. Google News should drop paid sources because they don’t serve a purpose for consumers. Here we go again, but let’s take a look at Google’s mission statement. “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It’s clear cut and to the point.
So I can see them thinking that even offering news excerpts from paid subscription news sites as a means of “organizing the world’s information,” but it’s not entirely. If you want to access that “information,” you need to pay for a subscription to that site.
There are three solutions for this problem.
- Offer a “free” viewing of the recent article for X amount of time, such as 24 or 48 hours from the time it was published — only being allowed to access it through Google News.
- Offer an option to only see news alerts that offer freely viewed content, excluding all paid subscription feeds.
- Drop paid subscriptions feeds and only offer news content that is freely available to the world.
Paid subscriptions rarely render new subscriptions for people that are just trying to stay up on one topic. If I had the money to go buy a subscription for every news site out there, I simply wouldn’t have the time to even read the content anymore.
I feel Google needs to rethink this business plan and re-evaluate how they are distributing feeds.
Incoming search terms:
- news site with paid subscription
Gary Sims
Sep 4th, 2007
Jonathan,
I couldn’t agree more, I use Google Alerts to send me a daily email with certain news topics (based on keyword) and it is REALLY annoying when I click on one of the stories to find it is from a subscription news site. What are they thinking? That mu first reaction will be, “Oh yes, I must subscribe to this news site, where is my credit card”. NO!
Good post.
Gary
Peter Pollak
Feb 4th, 2008
I disagree with omiting links to paid websites. That’s denying the searcher information which could turn out to be more harmful than the supposed harm of including information for which there is a cost. Let the searcher decide whether the information is worth paying for, but don’t hide it from him.
Jonathan Dingman
Feb 4th, 2008
Peter,
I see your view and I understand it. Taking your position into consideration, I feel that Google News ought to, at a bare minimum, let you choose not to be alerted or view the paid subscription content. That way the user can choose whether or not they are able to search for content they can’t see without paying for it.
I simply feel that the current method of alerts and searching for news is faulty and misleading with so many paid subscriptions.