Paid content pass specification proposal

_proposal.md

Paid content pass specification proposal

Paid content makes up a significant portion of the content available online, especially high value content. Users who are seeking information via search engines frequently run queries for which the most relevant content is to be found from payment-required sources. However, in order that search crawlers are able to index this content, paid content publishers typically permit such crawlers to access their pages as if the crawler were a paid-up subscriber. As a result, search results displayed to users of search engines can create the expectation of free content and disappointment or frustration when the user is denied access.

To date, search providers have attempted to solve this problem by requiring content owners to make content available to searchers in the same form as it is available to the crawler, when a searcher clicks on a search result, a practice known as "First click free". In most cases it is a breach of the search provider's terms of service to bar search traffic from seeing content that was made avaialble to the crawler.

This has a number of significant disadvantages:

• The means used to determine the source of the traffic, the HTTP Referer header, is trivially spoofed, and plugins, browser extensions and bookmarklets make this spoofing easy to do even for non-technical users. This results in a feeling of unfairness in the marketplace and lost revenue for publishers.
• If a user gets content via First Click Free and then shares the URL with a friend, the friend will not be entitled to FCF and so will not get the content their friend intended to share.
• It imposes a specific business model on publishers that may not suit them. For example some publishers limit non-subscribers to a certain number of free articles per month, and it is difficult to count these accesses unambigiuously if some are search referrals that would otherwise be entitled to first click free.

The following is not intended to be a replacement for First click free, but rather a different mechanism to solve the underlying problem of correctly setting the user's expectations for what they are can and cannot view for free when they are contemplating a set of search results. Publishers may choose to continue to use First click free in conjunction with this solution.

Overview of Content passes

There are a nearly infinite number of ways a content publisher could accept a payment in order to view a piece of content. Possible use cases include:

• Alice buys a subscription to the FT, and with a one off payment is entitled to view any FT content for a year
• Bob happens upon an article in the New Yorker that he'd like to read but doesn't want a subscription, so pays $4 to buy that article. He can now access that one article indefinitely.
• Charlie rents a film from iTunes. He pays $5 and now has 30 days in which to watch the movie, and 48 hours to finish watching it once started.
• Della buys a Video on demand package from her network operator, and sets up a monthly credit card payment of $20 for which she's entitled to view unlimited Netflix, Amazon on demand and Hulu content
• Edward buys $100 credit from an academic papers network, and is then able to view papers from hundreds of participating journals, each of which debit micropayments from his credit balance when he views paid content.
• Fred buys a Conde Nast premier pass for a monthly fee that he pays by direct debit, which entitles him to access any content across Wired, Vogue, GQ, Tatler, Vanity Fair etc.

Any of these types of content might conceivably be surfaced by a search engine in response to a query, but to date the search engine has not had any information about whether that content is free or premium, if it's premium, whether the user is entitled to view it or not, and finally, if they are not entitled to view it, what they need to buy in order to obtain that entitlement.

This proposal standardises the terminology used to describe the available payment options for content, and defines an associated microdata format that allows these options to be discovered easily by crawlers.

We define a content pass as a product, purchased by a user, that permits them to access one or more pieces of content. This generic description allows the pass concept to apply to almost any situation in which a user is required to pay to access content.

Discovery

An HTML page may indicate that it features paid content by including one or more of the following tag in the document:

<link rel='contentpass' href='https://example.com/subscribe'>

The tag has the following properties:

• rel: Set to "contentpass" to identify this link as a content pass
• href: Globally unique identifier for the pass, also the URL of the page where information about the pass can be obtained, both for the user and for the crawler.

Having discovered a document with a contentpass link, the crawler should fetch the link href. Documents defining a pass may include metadata about the pass using the <meta> tag. The following meta property names are defined for this purpose:

• contentpass:name: The name of the pass, eg "FT subscription"
• contentpass:payfreq: Payment frequency, one of 'annual', 'monthly', 'quarterly', 'weekly', 'daily', 'single', or 'other'
• contentpass:price: Price for the pass, either a single number, or a range in which both bounds are optional, eg '39.99', '40-', '-100', '15-45'
• contentpass:curr: Currency which should be used to interpret price (ISO 4217)
• contentpass:desc: A brief description of the access afforded by the pass, eg "Read unlimited articles from the FT for one year"

For example:

<meta property='contentpass:name' content='FT Subscription'>
<meta property='contentpass:payfreq' content='monthly'>
<meta property='contentpass:price' content='29'>
<meta property='contentpass:curr' content='GBP'>
<meta property='contentpass:desc' content='Read unlimited articles from the FT for one monthly payment'>

User experience

The search provider may choose what to do with the information picked up from content passes and the links between paid content and passes. For example, they may decide to:

• Label search results with an simple non-interactive icon if the result is paid content
• Add interactivity to the label allowing the user to see what passes are available that would entitle them to view the content, without needing to attempt to load the content
• Allow the user to click through directly to further information about a pass and purchase it
• Allow the user to tell the search provider which passes they currently hold, enabling the search provider to highlight paid content for which the user has already purchased a pass.

An example showing a possible user experience in Google is included in this gist.

image.png

It would be nice to see an example for multiple pass options. For example it's common to be offered a monthly subscription or an annual subscription with a discount. Perhaps you could use multiple link tags and the metadata could be moved into attributes on the tag. Or extend the namespace in the property attribute of the meta tags.

• I understand your point re. setting expectations and your thoughts behind presenting level of access to content but I wonder whether the lack of ability to provide/present a summary on benefits of purchase may not put the FT in the best light compared with results from cheaper publications, for which an article title says little about the quality of the content?
• I echo Richard on providing multiple payment terms. Additionally the FT runs multiple offers to the same products concurrently. You could argue that we've become wise to seeking the best offer on the internet and that it unwisely pits corporations against individuals in a kind of buying game. However, I can see why perhaps the FT would want to provide different offers to users it's been tracking through other means. I'm assuming this cache would only ever personalise offers with the info that e.g. Google is able to provide for a Google identity, or not at all?
• Since we sell in multiple currencies at different price points for different countries, I assume there would be some localisation logic that the search engine could use to localise the offer?
• Jeff Jarvis comments frequently on how media should be creating services, rather than selling content. Do the concepts of a 'contentpass' and 'pieces of content' fall into the trap of commoditising our content rather than promoting services built on the content? Google indexes both of course.
• on the gist text; academic publishing uses pay per view (PPV) language rather than micropayments.