Google One Pass

» see google.com/onepass as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The timing was the whole announcement. On 15 february 2011 Apple turned on subscriptions in the App Store and set the cut at thirty percent, and the publishing industry spent that evening being loudly unhappy about it. On the morning of the 16th Eric Schmidt was on a stage at Humboldt University in Berlin with One Pass, which took ten. Google said openly that it did not intend to make money on the thing.

Underneath it was Google Checkout doing the work, wrapped in a set of options that read like everything a newspaper had ever asked for. You could sell a subscription or a single article. You could sell a day pass, or meter the thing so the first few pieces were free. It ran on the web and inside apps, and one login carried across a publisher's whole estate rather than per device.

i was twenty seven in 2011 and writing software rather than selling any, and the honest version of my relationship with One Pass is that i never once hit a paywall running on it. Nothing i read used it. For a payment system that is not a small observation, it is the entire cause of death, and it was already obvious by the second half of that year.

~ the case file ~

~ the offer ~

Ninety ten was the headline and it was not actually the important part. Apple's rule at the time was that the customer belonged to Apple unless they chose to hand their name over. Google's rule was that the publisher got the subscriber's information by default, which for a newspaper circulation department is worth considerably more than twenty points of margin.

It launched in seven countries, the US and Canada plus five in western Europe, then widened to wherever Google Checkout already worked. Axel Springer signed. So did Tomorrow Focus, Media General, NouvelObs, Prisa, Rust Communications, Popular Science. Reading the roster back now it is mostly European, and mostly companies who wanted Apple to see them talking to Google.

~ why nobody took it ~

A payment layer is not a business model. Google shipped the plumbing and left the hard question, which was whether anyone would pay for a single publisher's website in 2011, entirely to the publisher. in fairness, nobody had a good answer to that yet. The Times of London had gone to a hard wall the summer before and lost most of its readers doing it. The New York Times metered wall did not open until 28 march, six weeks after One Pass was announced, and until it worked most of the industry was still hoping advertising would come back on its own.

The other problem was that One Pass was a Google product in the year publishers had decided Google was the reason their business was gone. Taking the payment rails from the search engine you were lobbying Brussels about was a strange thing to explain to your own board. the ten percent read less like generosity and more like a company that did not need the money because it already had the traffic.

~ the day it died ~

It went in a batch. On 20 april 2012 Google published one of its spring cleaning posts and One Pass was in it, alongside Google Related and the Patent Search homepage. The reason given was low usage, which was true. back then. there was no migration path offered to anyone still billing through it, because the number of people still billing through it was small enough not to need one.

Google's answer for publishers afterward was Consumer Surveys, where the reader answers a market research question instead of paying money, which is a different product wearing the same coat. google.com/onepass returns a 404 today. The address one.google.com now belongs to a storage subscription, so the name did survive, attached to the thing Google actually wanted people to buy.

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