On the proverbial eve of the New York Times’ return to paywalldom (has everyone forgotten the Times already dropped its pay wall once because it didn’t work), a research firm posted a study showing 44 percent of Google News visitors scan headlines and don’t click through.

They think this is high. I’m shocked it’s so low.

Analyst Ken Doctor says: “Though Google is driving some traffic to newspapers, it’s also taking a significant share away. A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers’ individual sites.”

What is Google taking away? If I read all the newspaper and magazine headlines at the newsstand, am I taking something away? No. It’s the newspaper’s job to convince me to “buy” or, in this case, click. Google is providing a huge amount of free advertising for these newspapers and converting 56 percent of that traffic. Any marketer will tell you a 56 percent conversion rate is astronomically high. It is up to those newspapers to turn that traffic into loyal readers.

For Rupert Murdoch and others looking to block Google because it’s taking so much for itself, they are just going to leave that 56 percent for the thousands of other news sources willing share in free advertising. And if they really learn from this study, they’ll figure out how to write better headlines and better stories to convert the other 44 percent.