On Oct 31, 2023, Google announced that their Reader Revenue Manager (RRM) for publishers and Subscribe with Google (SwG) for website subscribers is now available in 47 countries.
When originally launched earlier this year, the RRM and SwG were only available in the US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico & Argentina.
The Reader Revenue Manager is a Google product that helps publishers monetize their content through subscription or contribution programs.
Subscribe with Google is the service that readers use to subscribe or contribute to the site.
Publishers may apply for access to the Reader Revenue Manager through the Google Publisher Center.
Countries that the RRM and SwG are Available In:
- Argentina
- Australia
- Austria
- Belgium
- Brazil
- Bulgaria
- Canada
- Chile
- Colombia
- Costa Rica
- Croatia
- Czech Republic
- Denmark
- Estonia
- France
- Germany
- Hong Kong
- Hungary
- Indonesia
- Ireland
- Italy
- Japan
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Malta
- Mexico
- Netherlands
- New Zealand
- Norway
- Peru
- Poland
- Portugal
- Romania
- Saudi Arabia
- Singapore
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- South Africa
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Taiwan
- Turkey
- Ukraine
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Vietnam
What you Need to Know
Here’s a problem for readers and publishers alike.
There are still quite a few countries that aren’t supported yet, including India.
Let’s assume you are in a listed country and use the Reader Revenue Manager to set up a paywall for your site.
If a reader outside of the above countries hits that paywall – they can’t see your content, and they can’t buy it.
They get this message instead: “Purchase not available. This content can not be purchased in your location” (see image above).
Of course, if your readership is primarily based in the countries on the list, that’s not a gamer changer.
If your readership is more diverse, this could be a problem until Google expands the program.
It would be helpful if Google would give us some options on how to handle readers in unsupported countries. Perhaps a setting in the Publisher Center that publishers could click on to give readers in unsupported countries free access until RRM and SwG expands into them?
If you would like Google to implement that solution, join me in sending them a feature request.
A potential server-side solution (ie: up to the publisher to implement) would be to determine a reader’s country by ip address and not include the SwG code on the site for them. Perhaps display ads instead.
I’ll look into adding that as a feature in our RevPress plugin.
