After much debate and fanfare, Google has bent to the will of Media Moguls agreeing to limit content to paid media sites. It is hard to argue Google’s logic but there is a definite flaw in the resolution.

Under the First Click Free programme, publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites. Users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages. Source: news.bbc.co.uk

If the media site in question doesn’t want to be viewed by Google’s crawler, they can simply have it be removed by their robots.txt file, no? Why are they making this so complicated? Rupert Murdoch of Newscorp was first to point out that links through Google are not generating any revenue, so why not block all of them?

Maybe Rupert Murdoch’s claim that Google’s click thorough are worthless was a bit overstated. It seems that they want people to visit their sites via Google, they just don’t want people going around their subscription via Google. That makes sense. Personally, I would have taken a different approach, I would have simply monitored traffic and made the changes on my local server to block users after a set limit. Having Google do it just gives Google more control on traffic, something that it seems they are trying to avoid.

This change also doesn’t eliminate other news aggregators, assuming of course that they aren’t being blocked by the media outlet. While Google will be able to control the traffic flowing to the media outlet, they will still need to deal with various other aggregators.

In the end, the real problem that printed Mainstream Media is facing is revenue. Advertising revenue isn’t bringing in as much money as had been originally anticipated, and few are willing to buy printed newspapers anymore. This is leading many mainstream media outlets to resort to paid content. However, this may in fact backfire over the long run. As more and more media sources arise, people can get their news from free places, avoiding pay services altogether. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.