Search engine giant Google has announced that newspaper publishers can now enable limited access to the number of free articles to viewers via the search engine.

This comes from news media such as News Corporation claiming that Google are profiting from online news pages.

Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager of Google has said: “Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free.”

Now users have restricted access to no more than five articles in a day, so after the fifth click users will be redirected to a registration page.

He adds: “We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis.”

This approach follows on from newspapers experiencing a drop in revenue in the past couple of years.

The UK's largest regional newspaper publisher, Johnston Press sees a fall of 42% in revenue in the last two years, while News Corp lost $3.4bn (£2bn) in the last 12 months, according to research.

The decline has led to newspapers being in a constant search for revenue.

SOURCE: BBC, NMA