Who'd link to the NYT if it was always a paywall, indeed?
Of course I understand that the publishers don't want to cut themselves out of the conversation.
But why must "the conversation" be limited to powerful internet companies? Do we not converse about news articles in blog posts? Comment threads? Up and coming social platforms that don't have Facebooks media clout yet?
It's simply unfair to treat a visitor arriving at your site from Google differently to a visitor arriving at your site from anywhere else. It runs against the grain of the web. To that end, if I hadn't published this extension, someone else would have made it. If Google removes "Referer" privileges from Chrome extensions, someone will fork Chromium to allow them again. Let's build a better — a more fair — paywall.
So publishers should either block traffic from search engines, or not have a paywall at all. Neither seems economically viable to me.
It would not be hard for Google to append one-time, time-limited tokens to SERP links to get searchers from Google to NYT (or other big publishers). Google would just need to provide an invite-only API for the publishers to check the tokens against in real time. At their scale this would be pretty trivial. This would have the neat effect of breaking your extension, and locking in special treatment.
Google would not bother to do this right now, because the referrer trick largely benefits Google (the typical advice is "just Google the headline"), and is not widely abused. But if people start widely circumventing both Google and the paywall (with something like your extension), then the interests will align and Google and the publishers will act together.
Google executives have said repeatedly and publicly that they want existing news organizations to survive and feel a responsibility to help them do so.
So your proposal if to make Google say "hmm, I don't really think you searched for that, so the link is going to have missing content"? Otherwise how are they gonna differentiate between someone searching and finding the article "by accident" vs on purpose? Sounds like a crappy user experience.
Of course I understand that the publishers don't want to cut themselves out of the conversation.
But why must "the conversation" be limited to powerful internet companies? Do we not converse about news articles in blog posts? Comment threads? Up and coming social platforms that don't have Facebooks media clout yet?
It's simply unfair to treat a visitor arriving at your site from Google differently to a visitor arriving at your site from anywhere else. It runs against the grain of the web. To that end, if I hadn't published this extension, someone else would have made it. If Google removes "Referer" privileges from Chrome extensions, someone will fork Chromium to allow them again. Let's build a better — a more fair — paywall.