Google News Showcase Tries To Address The Paywall Elephant In The Room

While many praise and thank Google for making information and news available to the masses on the Internet, others, especially publishers, hate it for almost the same reason. Some have even sued Google for putting directly in Search results content that should otherwise be viewed on the content owner's website. And then there's paywalled content that effectively blocks users from accessing those without paying a fee. In order to better promote its News platform, Google is negotiating with publishers in order to provide some locked content to readers for absolutely no charge at all.

To be clear, Google isn't just making available paywalled content for free at the expense of publishers that own them. It will be the one publishing partners that are taking part in this relatively new Google News Showcase program. Even then, only select articles will be made available for free, pretty much like a trial or appetizer.

There are, however, more caveats to this seemingly generous offer. The biggest one for people will be the requirement to still register for each and every publisher they want to view paywalled content from. This, Google says, is so that publishing partners can build relationships with readers, which is to say that they will send you regular communications (read: spam) to convince you to sign up and pay for a subscription.

Another limit of this paywall program is that Google News Showcase itself isn't available in all regions of the world. Google only names Germany, Brazil, Argentina, France, the UK, and Australia as some of the few but it is working to expand its reach to more countries. Courting US publishers might be trickier than in other countries.

Google is also working to expand Showcase beyond Android and iOS to Google News on the Web and its Discover feature. Together with a new panel for curating important local and national news from users' favorite publishers, Google is more aggressively pushing its platform as the new way people could get their daily news fix and not from Facebook or Twitter.