Hugene - 4:37 pm on Dec 2, 2009 (gmt 0)

Someone needs to explain this to me: lets say a site is subscription based only, but with FCF, they can remove the need for subscription, for one click only? Is that it?

I understand the economic motive behind wanting tho use this feature (get the user interested and not turned down by a subscription page right away) but also anyone who uses this must be aware of the consequences (that it will be cheated, as everything that can be cheated on the Web is)

Here is a BCC article [news.bbc.co.uk] on the topic that completely confuses me:

Some readers have discovered they can avoid paying subscription fees to newspaper websites by calling up their pages via Google.

Does that mean that "every" first click was free? That is, if I click a story on a paid site from Google, because it was considered a first click, it was always free? If so, then this is dementedly stupid, and any site that was participating has only themselves to blame.

If you want your content to be private, then put a subscription wall in front of it, but let Google crawl it, and request for the "cached" option to be removed. It's as simple as that.