Helpers for producing schema.org markup in JSON LD on ft.com

SwG Markup associates a productID, which encompasses associated entitlements, with your content for authorization purposes.

Scenario: You want to sell SwG subscriptions. To honor these subscriptions, the SwG client must be able to check a user’s entitlements with Google and match those entitlements to the current page in order to properly grant or bar access.

Scenario: You want to indicate to Google what content is associated with an entitlement, so that a signed-in Google User, with the entitlement to access your content, sees the content more prominently in Google products.

Markup your pages with a productID and publication name. This markup:

• Globally identifies your publication to SwG
• Indicates the entitlement required to access the content
• Indicates whether or not this particular document requires entitlement
• Helps swg.js check access to the content

The markup is an extension of the existing Subscription and paywalled content markup, which you should be using to indicate restricted content to Google. The markup must include publisher property.

Note: A productID can be changed, but the new productID should be added to SKUs before changing the markup on the page. After a grace period to ensure full indexing, the deprecated productID can be removed from relevant SKUs.

Firstly it is important to understand that each piece of content has an accessLevel associated with it. The access levels / restrictions for content are free,registered,subscribed,premium.

These map nicely to Google's idea of user "entitlements". Whereby a user with an ft.com:subscribed entitlement would be allowed access to subscribed content and everything below (+ registered + free).

1. ft.com:free (access to content with a free accessLevel)
2. ft.com:registered (registered accessLevel content + free)
3. ft.com:subscribed (subscribed accessLevel content + registered + free)
4. ft.com:premium (premium accessLevel content + subscribed + registered + free)

For obvious reasons we only offer SKUs for purchase via Subscribe with Google that are either ft.com:subscribed (entitlements 1-3) and ft.com:premium (all entitlements).

Note: This works in conjunction with the existing isAccessibleForFree schema which indicates if content is accessible for free. In terms of access, the isAccessibleForFree property would trump any of the productIDs/labels.

Included in the JSON-LD (but not the snippet below) is a whole load of other meta data about the article.

{
	'@context': 'https://schema.org',
	'@type': 'NewsArticle',
	[...]
	'isAccessibleForFree': 'False',
	'isPartOf': {
		'@type': [ 'CreativeWork', 'Product' ],
		'name' : 'Financial Times',
		'productID': 'ft.com:subscribed' // or 'ft.com:premium' or 'ft.com:registered' depending on the requested content accessLevel
	}
}

SwG would automatically fetch all our SKUs on a free page (which is what you would want in the case of running a promotion).

{
	'@context': 'https://schema.org',
	'@type': 'NewsArticle',
	[...]
	'isAccessibleForFree': 'True',
	'isPartOf': {
		'@type': [ 'CreativeWork', 'Product' ],
		'name' : 'Financial Times',
		'productID': 'ft.com:free'
	}
}

Content barriers populate the isPartOf markup with data pertaining to the requested content. Unlike actual article pages it does not include the additional article meta data.

{
	'@context': 'https://schema.org',
	'isAccessibleForFree': 'False',
	'isPartOf': {
		'@type': [ 'CreativeWork', 'Product' ],
		'name' : 'Financial Times',
		'productID': 'ft.com:subscribed' // or 'ft.com:premium' or 'ft.com:registered' depending on the requested content accessLevel
	}
}

For the product selector the SwG client is manually invoked passing in the relevant config, therefore the markup is not required on barriers.