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Ricardo Bilton

February 14, 2018

Google gave a preview of some features it’s been working on and thinking about regarding its support for subscription news organizations at its Digital News Initiative Summit on Thursday (on the same day it also rolled out a built-in adblocker in its Chrome browsers).

The search platform and digital advertising giant also announced that it would be opening its fifth round of DNI funding at the end of this month; the theme of the upcoming round will be diversifying revenue models.

Most relevant for the increasing number of news publishers focusing on getting readers to pay for subscriptions is how Google intends to treat publishers with paywalls. It’s already ended the longtime first-click-free loophole and has been working with a couple of major subscription news publishers on potential tools for publishers over the past year. Now we know a bit more about how subscription outlets might be treated within the Google Search environment:

Et voilà: Google presents a Paywall button to publishers, and it includes finding the texts in a special section "subscriptions" on Google Search #dni2018 pic.twitter.com/g2qz5L5twd

— Marcus Schwarze (@MarcusSchwarze) February 15, 2018

Significant: Google are evolving AMP and moving into the subscription management part of the stack (w/Play). Here's how it might work (javascript on clientside, APIs to manage entitlements and paywalls). #dni2018 pic.twitter.com/neVRFVArHD

— Adam Thomas (@datatheism) February 15, 2018

Google is talking about treating users differently when it knows a user is a subscriber to a given media site. I've been hoping for this for a couple of years. It's in essence a data exchange about users between platform and publisher. #dni2018

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) February 15, 2018

Google has been successful in encouraging publishers to get in line with its totally voluntary Accelerated Mobile Pages project, though, as Lucia Moses at Digiday points out, there’s quite a lot of pressure coming from how these faster, AMP-enabled pages are ranked in search results. Referral traffic from Google Search has been up more than 25 percent since January 2017, according to a recent Chartbeat analysis of its network — a 100 percent year-over-year increase in mobile search traffic from Google on AMP-enabled sites (traffic from search on desktop hasn’t increased at all). This week, Google also announced a new Snapchat Story–like format that it’s been testing with several large partner publishers.

After news ads, Google is moving into news subscriptions, Snapchat-type story building tools (AMP Stories), UCG tools, news butlers and voice news (Bulletin). Genuine concerns raised by publishers about who 'owns' the customer, and who gets the data. #dni2018 https://t.co/g2nw2nsPrM

— Danielle Batist (@daniellebatist) February 15, 2018

It also wants to work with local news outlets on its hyperlocal news-sharing app, Bulletin, which it’s testing Nashville and Oakland:

Google is experimenting Bulletin in the US. The pilot project allows anyone to publish local news stories and events. Google wants to work with local news organizations to help them find and publish some of the stories posted to Bulletin #DNI2018 https://t.co/oIGvQREpPF pic.twitter.com/XIXjdmvsdf

— Vincent Peyregne (@vincentpeyregne) February 15, 2018

Publishers were also asking for a lot more:

Partial list of problems/issues I've heard people at #dni2018 suggest Google should solve/make disappear

-lack of diversity in newsrooms
-polarized political debate (include fact there is a demand for sites like Breitbart)
-low trust in news
1/3

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) February 15, 2018

-ePrivacy regulation that'll challenge online advertising as we know it
-incremental pace of growth in people paying for news
-fact many people don't like sh*t ads that slow & bloat websites, and sometimes block them
-"fake news" regulation potentially restricting free speech
2/3

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) February 15, 2018

-slow pace of innovation in many European news orgs
-limited investment available to journalism start-ups in many European countries.

I'm sure I've missed some.

Google can do much. But news industry, journalistic profession, & Europe also needs to own some of these problems 3/3

— Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (@rasmus_kleis) February 15, 2018

By all means, demand away! But always be wary before jumping into experiments with platforms like Google and Facebook. Campbell Brown’s candid response during this week’s Code Media conference was instructive on that front:

I think we have not done a great job in the past and we need to think about this differently going forward around setting expectations when we launch a test with a set of partners. It’s really thrash-y and really unsettling for people who are trying to have some stability so they can build a business…we have to be way more transparent and candid with publishers going in that this may not work out. And jump in with us if you’re ready for a big experiment that might not work!