You can implement first click free (where searchers can read the story they found in Google News - but clicking on any other link triggers the paywall), have your site marked as "subscription" in the results or display a minimum 80-word summary of the article.

What you can't do is show Google News one thing - and searchers a subscription page. But that's what the News of the World is doing.

What the News of the World is doing

It's applying first click free to most of its recent stories but locking some new ones behind the paywall.

So it's getting the benefit of all its stories being in Google News but still putting up a "subscribe now" message to people who click through to some of them.

You can run a Google source search to see all the News of the World stories in Google News.

The story pictured here, for instance, is freely accessible from Google News, as it should be with first click free (this search at Google News will find the story).

However, if you click through into the second page of that "source" search, you can see stories such as this one about Cheryl Cole (this search will return that page in Google News if you want to try to see it).

Cheryl Cole story: triggers the paywall

Click through to that one, however, and you get the paywall subscription page:

The paywall is triggered

Here's another story that's in Google's index from last weekend but which triggers the paywall message (run this search to find that story and see):

Wayne Rooney story: triggers the paywall

And here's a third (run this search to find it):

Only Way is Essex story: triggers the paywall

Go back far enough and Google is applying the "suscription" marker to old stories as this screenshot shows (of the last story published on the 9th March and the first on the 10th).

Really old stories have "subscription"

But that still leaves high-profile pages from the most recent weekend that don't have the "subscription" marker, which the News of the World has let Google index - but which searchers now can't see unless they sign up.

And is it coincidence that the pages in question involve popular search terms like Wayne Rooney, Cheryl Cole and The Only Way is Essex?

Google is clear about this:

Google has strict policies against what's known as cloaking: showing one web page to the crawler that indexes it but then a different page to a user. We do this so that users aren't deceived into clicking through to a site that's not what they were expecting.

Will Google take action? Let's wait and see ...

• 105,000 paid-for sales to date in any form (NB journos - NOT subscribers)
• Half of these ARE monthly subscribers (digital sites plus iPad / Kindle edition)
• The rest are single copy or pay as you go.
• 100,000 joint digital/print subs who have activated their accounts (figure for ongoing use not given).

Including the joint digital/print subs (despite not knowing how many are active), that means they've got 150,000 subscribers to their digital products.

Which is actually quite good. It's a shame that the initial numbers were so misreported (the press release, however, was very clear).

This figure looks completely meaningless to me. People "paying to access" include those, like me, who have paid for a 24-hour subscription once.

That does not mean we are subscribers.

If 104,999 have paid for 24-hour access ever, that would mean they had 1 subscriber. If no-one had paid for 24-hour access, they might still have 105,000 app buyers but no website subscribers.

So without a breakdown, there is nothing you can read into these figures.

Times paywall

Any chance of getting one ...? No, I thought not. (Update Apologies for cynicism. I got one!)

Restricted

To work this out, I looked at how many people commented on two similar stories - one on the Times site (now paywalled) and one on the Guardian site. As you can see below, from screenshots captured at 1.45pm yesterday, the Times had had 4 comments in almost exactly 2 hours. The Guardian, on its similar but slightly later story, had had 117 comments in 90 minutes.

So if we take the number of readers of the Guardian's website - 1.8 million a day according to the most recent ABCes - multiply that by 4/117 (the ratio of comments on each story) and then multiply that by 90/120 (to allow for the fact that the Times story had been online longer) we get:

1,800,000 x (4/117) x (90/120) = 46,154 readers.

Comparing Guardian and Times comment numbers on similar stories

Some assumptions ...

Obviously, there are a bunch of assumptions built into here, so 46,154 has a somewhat spurious level of accuracy.

Propensity to comment

It's probably not true that the same proportion of readers comment on Times stories as Guardian ones. Finding comparable data was hard, however, as the Times seems to have removed the comments from all its old pre-paywall stories, so I couldn't see how many comments Times stories got pre-paywall compared to the Guardian.

Growth of comments over time

The number of comments probably doesn't grow in a linear way over time - but comparing stories after 90 minutes and 2 hours seems close enough.

Comment bait

The stories aren't exactly the same so may not have motivated people to comment in the same proportions.

But you'd be surprised how hard it is to find stories on newspaper sites with the same sort of angle published at the same sort of time and which allow comments. These were the most comparable stories I could find.

And it's not as if other Times stories have loads of comments, as this screenshot of the homepage at 5.10pm yesterday shows - after 3 hours there are only 4 comments about Joe Cole signing for Liverpool and just 6 comments after 3hrs 40 mins about Cameron calling the Lockerbie bomber's release "utterly wrong".

Few comments on other stories

Comparing this figure with other estimates

15,000 paying subscribers

This figure of 46,154 is higher than the 15,000 paying subscribers since the paywall went up that Beehivecity claimed over the weekend - but you'd expect this as existing Times+ subscribers (ie those who joined Times+ before the paywall went up) can also access the site. They will count towards daily unique visitors -  but won't count as extra paying subscribers.

I can't find a figure for Times+ subscribers, but I have this vague memory of about 60,000-odd of those. This story, from October 2009, claims Culture+, a version of TImes+, "has attracted 90,000 active members" (whatever "active members" means).

Either way,  if you subscribe to The Times newspaper 7 days a week, you get free access to the websites. So all this would explain why there are more than 15,000 daily viewers of The Times paywalled sites - because  people are getting it free as part of their other subscription packages.

2/3 drop

The FT, on the other hand, reported at the weekend that:

Visits to The Times’ website have dropped by two-thirds in the weeks since News International, the media group controlled by Rupert Murdoch, began to implement its paywall strategy, according to new data.

However, the decline has been gentler than the 90 per cent fall in traffic some researchers expected.

Now, 1.2 million readers used Times Online a day according to the last ABCes before it pulled out - so if its traffic had dropped by 90% it would be looking at 120,000 a day.

But even this figures sound too high to me, knowing what else we know. And Hitwise's figures seem a bit odd - the last lot in particular failed to distinguish between home page traffic and those that gone any further beyond the paywall.

So what do you think? I wrote once that, if anyone can charge for content, Murdoch can. But maybe even he can't ...

Photo credit

The launch threw up a number of questions - which no doubt they'll be mulling over and working on. The biggest one for me is why users would want to pay for two different websites covering the same subjects?

What's on offer?

The plan is to replace the current site - timesonline.co.uk - with two new sites, one for The Times and one for The Sunday Times.

£2 a week (or £1 for an individual day) buys you access to both sites. There isn't an option to get just one site.

The Times proposition

New homepage for The Times

The Times won't try to be a news wire - it'll be offering fewer stories on its home page than most online newspapers with the aim being to enhance those stories.

Alongside the news / business / sport it will have opinion, arts and life sections.

Without the need to chase search engine traffic or page views for advertisers, the idea of covering fewer stories but in a better way sounds appealing.

Here's an article, for instance, with an information graphic and tabs to let you explore the history and different aspects of the story without leaving the page. This package of content is brilliant - it works much better as an experience than lists of related articles or auto-generated tag pages.

Times article with infographic and tabs

The Sunday Times proposition

New Sunday Times homepage

The Sunday Times site will look very different to the Times's. It will have the sections people know from the paper. So, again there is news, sport and  business - but also culture, style, travel, In Gear and the magazine.

The site won't be updated much during the week - though the aim is still for it to function as a 7-days-a-week site.

But instead of trying to compete with the Times sites for news, it will offer readers the ability to browse and explore Sunday's content over the week, concentrating on galleries, videos and interactive graphics. Here's a gallery - you don't really get a sense of it from the screenshot but there was a lot of interactivity on the Sunday Times site:

Sunday Times gallery

Why two websites?

The decision to replace the current timesonline.co.uk site with two brands and two websites - thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk - has obviously meant some thinking about how they work together.

They seem clear enough that they are two products - a daily news site and a site that you're meant to browse all week.

But it was interesting that the reasons they talked about for this were the different editorial teams, the "different but overlapping audiences", the different values of the newspapers, and the different reasons why people buy the Sunday paper vs the weekday paper.

I get all that for print products that are published on different days.

I'm just not sure why this needs to translate into two different websites that aren't physical products and can be accessed easily on the same day ...

The Tuesday question

Take a Tuesday when I'm reading the online Times Arts section to decide what film or play to watch.

If I want to use the Sunday Times interactive culture tool (which looked great and even lets you remote control your Sky+ box) to explore reviews and book tickets then I need to go to a physically different website and browse to this tool. There's not even going to be a link to it. I don't get why they don't just make the tool available on the Times site as well ...

Or if I'm reading news about the BP oil spill on Tuesday on the Times site. How will I know there is an amazing interactive infographic on the Sunday Times site explaining what has happened so far?

Where there's overlap in subject matters, the content and functionality are split  across two sites. And there's no eaasy way for users to find out what's on the other site without going there and looking - which surely people aren't going to bother to do on a regular basis on the off chance there might be something there?

The Sunday question

The Times site isn't going to get updated much on a Sunday, unless there's breaking news. So it will be interesting to see how it covers Saturday's news when they do get round to writing about it - particularly sport.

Take the Champion's League final last Saturday. In print, the Times would have analysed it in its Monday paper edition, and the Sunday Times would have done a match report.

Online I'm not sure what will happen. It doesn't seem to make sense to split this content across two websites, though. Will the Times site publish a match report online, or will this just be on the Sunday Times site? Having two match reports seems a bit odd. But reading the analysis on the Times without being able to easily get to the Sunday Times match report seems odd too.

Should they let people subscribe to just one site?

I like the different approach they are taking on the two sites. And having them as separate sites might make sense if they were comptitors or if you could subscribe to just one - but you can't.

Given you have to take both, when they have overlapping content, why physically separate it? Why not just have one sport section or one culture section where you can see the differing Times / Sunday Times take on things?

It strikes me that there is either sufficient distinction in the audience for the two brands that you let users subscribe to just one site. Or the audiences cross over so much that you combine the two sites in one and think about what makes most sense from the user's point of view.

Forcing people to subscribe to both sites but keeping them entirely separate, with no cross linking, seems a bit odd.

How will people access the site?

There were, as you can imagine, several questions about how the paywall will work in practice.

Only two pages will be accessible if you're not logged in - the homepage of the The Times site and the homepage of the Sunday Times site. If you click on a link to a story, a box appears telling you to sign up or log in.

Here's the box:

The Times paywall: no further!

And here's what you see if you click to sign up. (As I've said before about paywalls, I think they're going to have to get this to work a LOT harder):

The sign up page needs to work harder

If you clicked on a deep link to a story, you are redirected to the homepage where the box appears (I think this sounds odder than it will be in practice although the page load speeds are a bit slow at the moment. To see it in action, click here (a deep link) and then wait for the overlay to appear ....). If you log in / sign up you are then redirected to the URL you were after.

The same is true of search engines, too - so Google won't be able to access the pages, which won't appear in Google's news or web search - with one small caveat. Google will be able to see URLs that are shown on the homepage but as it sees a login box if it tries to crawl the URL, I'm not 100% clear what happens then.

What are you getting?

There will be a 4 week period after the launch of these two new sites (a launch which was said to be "very imminent" - ie today!) where the current site and the new sites will exist together. Last night I thought they said there wouldn't be a paywall so the new sites will be fully accessible so people could see what the sites were all about. But you can't get past the homepages at the moment.

All three sites will be updated, and you'll be able to browse around the new Times and Sunday Times sites to see what they look like.

After 4 weeks, the paywall goes up and you'll need to pay to access the new sites. At that point, the old site will stop being updated. Confused? We were a bit!

As things stand, this means there will be the paid-for Times Archive, spanning 1785 to 1985. Then the current timesonline site will sit on the internet, not being updated from the end of June but with old stories still accessible. And the two new sites will run behind a paywall for any new content.

Although this seems a bit weird, I don't suppose it matters too much ...

Marketing the sites

What will be interesting to see is how they encourage people to sign up once the paywall is there - how will they show people what they'll be getting if they sign up?

There was no discussion this evening of tours or free trials or anything. I'm sure they've got something planned.

To sum up ...

Overall, they seemed to have some interesting views on what each product is and how it will work.

And I do understand the distinction they were trying to draw between a daily news site on the one hand and a weekly site on the other.

But when the daily news site is actually only 6 days a week, and covers much of the same subject matter as the weekly site ... and when they're offered as part of the same subscription with no option to just get one ... that's when I start to get a bit confused.

Have they projected their internal structure onto the websites they offer customers at the expense of the user experience?

Or do they have a much better grasp of what their audiences want on different days and in different modes?

Only time - and The Timeses - will tell (< sorry).

Times paywall email

The rest of the email says that

Every day we'll hold live debates and discussions at thetimes.co.uk. Covering everything from sports, to fashion, to business and the latest issues in the news, you'll be able to engage with the biggest names and put experts on the spot if you wish.

On the sundaytimes.co.uk you can plan your perfect night out, with our unique interactive culture planner. Book tickets, remotely record TV shows, and stay informed with the help of our critics.

These are just two of the many new features you'll find on our new websites. Soon you'll be able to do more than just read the news - you can debate it, interrogate it, watch it, shape it and be part of it 24 hours a day.

Interesting

• "The conclusion is clear - charging for local news online is something of a no-go." (Paid Content)
• Rupert Murdoch: "he’s on to a surefire loser." (Bitter wallet).

However, my view is that the Johnston Press experiment tells us precisely nothing about anything. The reason? Johnston Press had implemented its paywall in the worst way possible. All you can learn from this is that a paywall that makes no attempt to sell the content won't sell any subscriptions.

Why Johnston Press's paywall was rubbish

Here's an example of its former paywall (ie what you saw when you tried to read an article).

Northumberland Gazette paywall

As I've pointed out before in my paywall review, this was rubbish.

It used jargon, describing itself as "premium content", and failed to explain the benefits of subscription. With this particular paper, they described themselves as "the n/a site". As far as I am aware, this bug was never fixed during the whole four month paywall experiment.

How to implement a paywall properly

I won't rehash my paywall review, which had good and bad examples. But let's see what Rupert Murdoch's been doing since I wrote that.

The Times

Here's the current information about the coming paywall for the Times:

Times paywall info

And the Sunday Times:

Sunday Times paywall info

Altogether more engaging and attempting to sell the content - unlike the Johnston Press example.

South Coast Today: a paywall in action

And here's a paywall in operation at another one of Rupert Murdoch's papers, South Coast Today. Here's what you see once you've hit the 10-article limit:

South Coast Today paywall

Then you're taken to some screens which explains more. You can choose to register or pay:

South Coast today: register or subscribe

Not sure of the benefits of subscribing over just registering?

Registration vs subscription compared

Interestingly, you can even get the site and paper bundled in one subscription if you live in the right area (note that a subscription to the paper only or the website only cost the same).

Print and web options

Conclusion

These methods of selling people paid subscriptions to websites may not be perfect (I think the South Coast could do a lot better with the box that tells you that you need to subscribe to read more).

But they make a much better fist of it than Johnston Press has.

I wrote in an email at the time Johnston launched its paywall that:

The danger is that a badly executed paywall puts Johnston Press and others off. They could do it SO much better, which would surely improve conversions. All a bad trial tells you is that bad trials don't work ...

And that's my conclusion today. A paywall that doesn't sell the benefits of subscription won't sell anything. And that's all that Johnston Press's experiment has proved.

Imagine if Google offered a deal like this to news publishers (as you'll have guessed, this is exactly how Google Scholar works):

• Where content is behind a paywall, Google will index it all and include it in its web results even if searchers who click through to the page are then told they can't read the story without subscribing.
• Google will work out which is the authoritative source of a story and show that - so newspapers breaking exclusives get priority over bloggers etc.
• Google won't differentiate these results in any way - searchers will think they're going to see the content they can see in the Google results, but actually they'll hit a paywall.

As I say, that's exactly how Google Scholar works - but it's not a deal that Google's offering to newspapers.

How Google Scholar works

Here's an example of the Google Scholar scheme in action. I did a search for "innocent purchasers" (don't ask) and saw this result - notice the snippet of text showing some relevant content

This is how this page appeared in Google's normal web results

But when I clicked through to the page, all I saw was this:

What you see when you click through

The text from the snippet is nowhere to be seen (it's not in the meta data either). All that's shown in the issue details.

Google says that sites in Google Scholar must abide by this rule:

Google users must be offered at least a complete abstract. This is a crucial component of our indexing program. For papers with access restrictions, a full author-written abstract will help users choose among the results which paper is the most likely to have the information they are looking for.

But it seems you can get away with a few lines about which issue it was in.

How this differs from the normal search results

This sort of arrangement isn't on offer to news organisations.

In Google news

News sites with a paywall can appear in Google News. They can either take part in first click free (explained here) in which case they must offer full access to the story for searchers coming via Google News (ie they must allow them through the paywall). As Google puts it:

To implement First Click Free, you need to allow all users who find a document on your site via Google search to see the full text of that document, even if they have not registered or subscribed to see that content. The user's first click to your content area is free. However, once that user clicks a link on the original page, you can require them to sign in or register to read further.

Alternatively, they can appear in the results without offering the content, in which case the result looks like this (note the subscription tag):

How subscription sites appear in Google News

Clicking through, you see a message like this:

Hitting the paywall

Google web results

With its standard Google web search, first click free is still available to site publishers. They can have paywalls but, if they want Google to index their content, they must allow searchers who click through from Google to see it.

The second option described above is NOT available for Google's normal web search.

Google's very clear that, for its main web search, you cannot show search engines one thing and users another - so you can't let Google index the pages but not let users see the content when the click through:

Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

So what's the difference?

The difference is this. In its normal web results, as opposed to its news results, Google will only index paywalled content if you abide by the first click free rules - so you must let users see the content if they come via Google.

With Google Scholar, the rules are different:

If your works are already online, we may need nothing more than your permission for our crawlers to visit your site. As noted above, an abstract (at least) of each work must be available to non-subscribers who come from Google and Google Scholar.

If you're in the Google Scholar program, it will still index the content even if you don't let searchers see it. And this content appears in the normal web results, not just the specialised Google Scholar search.

On top of all this, Google tries to work out the primary version of a work for content in Google Scholar:

When multiple versions of a work are indexed, we select the full and authoritative text from the publisher as the primary version.

How this would help Rupert Murdoch

So if Murdoch wants to put the Sunday Times or the Sun behind a paywall but still wanted Google to index his content for the main web index (as opposed to just Google News), he would have to join first-click free.

If he decides the Sun is really the Wapping News Journal and joins Google Scholar, then the rules would be different. He could have his content indexed without having to let anyone see it unless they paid a subscription. On top of which, Google would give his content priority if was the original source of a story.

Sadly, a quick glance at paywalls shows that publishers - and Johnston Press in particular - need to massively improve the way they promote the benefits of subscribing ...

Awful attempts to sell content subscription

Northumberland Gazette

Northumberland Gazette paywall

For a start, if you're selling content, maybe make it look good? Don't refer to "the n/a site" ...

And let's sell the product. What's good about a premium subscription? What do I get, and how does it benefit me? I think some marketing advice is desperately needed here.

Worksop Guardian

Worksop Guardian paywall

This is the other half of Johnston Press's experiment - pointing out you can only read the story in full in the paper.

Could this be more underwhelming? Let's not talk about the great content in the paper or the benefits of reading or anything ... And let's not make the upsell message stand out, either.

Fairly poor

NMA

NMA paywall

First things first - this is your main marketing message. So a greyish font on a lilac background does not stand out.

Second, try to SELL THE BENEFITS. I can get full access to the website - great. But why is this good? What are the events and supplements. I know this subscription will most be paid by companies, but that's no reason not to do some proper marketing.

FT.com

FT paywall

(Click for a bigger version if you can't read it). I guess the FT may have tested this and it works. In which case ignore me. But to me it doesn't do a very good job of selling the benefits of registration for free (let alone subscribing). I can see some more articles. And some tools I've ever heard of that aren't described. Woo hoo.

Much better

Telegraph Clued Up

Telegraph Clued Up paywall

(Again, click to make bigger). Now we're getting somewhere. A description of the benefits (prizes, different puzzles, 5,000 to do), some proper thought into how the subscription is described and a strong call to action. Good.

Tmes Crossword Club

Times Crossword paywall

It's a bit hard to read, but look - a list of member benefits! That's how to sell ...

Which?

(Click to make bigger, plus disclaimer - I worked on this redesign). You can see what you would get in context, there's a description of the benefits AND a strong call to action. Which? lets you browse round all the content and just hides the best information - the ratings.

Conclusion

Are publishers embarrassed by paywalls? Do they not understand how to sell? Do they not understand how to sell online?

I'm not sure what the issue is - but some publishers who want people to pay for online content clearly need to give a lot more thought to their marketing ... They should stop DESCRIBING it, and start SELLING it.

“Like all other publishers, we’re experimenting with paid-for models online,” said editor Justin Pearse. “While previously lead stories from the magazine were accessible for free, we’re confident this content, together with the analysis our site provides to the industry, is worth paying for.”

NMA.co.uk: sign in to see (unless you came from Google, in which case I'll drop my knickers).

The only exceptions to this rule were said to be opinon as well as daily breaking news which would remain free for seven days. Despite this, you can read any story on the site if you search for it on Google.

Accessing stories via Google

So try and access the URL I took that quote from directly and you're confronted with a login box. Likewise, search for the quote above on the site and click the result, and you get the login box again.

Now, instead, take the URL of that post, search for it on Google, and click the result - da da! You get to read the article.

This works with any URL on the site. Try to access this post directly - or else search for it on Google and get to read it.

First click free

So what's going on? NMA are taking advantage of google's first-click free program. Here's Google's explanation:

First Click Free is designed to protect your content while allowing you to include it Google's search index. To implement First Click Free, you must allow all users who find your page through Google search to see the full text of the document that the user found in Google's search results and that Google's crawler found on the web without requiring them to register or subscribe to see that content. The user's first click to your content is free and does not require logging in. You may, however, block the user with a login or payment or registration request when he tries to click away from that page to another section of your content site.

First-click free always raises a troubling question for me. How do you persuade your users that you're "confident this content ... is worth paying for" when it transpires you give it away to every tom, dick or harry who arrives via Google?

And maybe this isn't news to some of you. But there was a big debate on paidcontent.org between Ashley Friedlein, CEO of econsultancy, and Andy Oakes, publisher of New Media Age.

At no point did Andy admit to using first-click free ... Maybe he's hoping paying subscribers won't notice?