Murdoch to remove News Corporation from Google news search index

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/digital-media/6559694/Rupert-Murdoch-to-remove-News-Corps-content-from-Google-in-months.html

Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer, said the media mogul was ready to block Google’s access to his sites soon and that the company would lead the media industry in this direction.

“There is real tension surrounding the free versus pay debate,” Mr Miller told the Monaco Media Forum on Friday. “It will play out in the next two years. We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognised online [by giving its away for free) so something needs to happen.

“I don’t believe the media industry can continue to exist in this way.”

When asked how long it would be before Mr Murdoch took the step to block Google, which every media company relies upon to send them high levels of web traffic, Mr Miller said it would be soon – “months and quarters – not weeks”.

He also said that News Corporation, which owns The Times and The Sun newspapers in Britain, could survive both economically and audience-wise without the search giant driving traffic to its sites.

“The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not read one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact [of not having content indexed by Google] is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.”

However, Mr Miller admitted News Corporation could not make the bold step alone but was prepared to lead other media companies in this direction. “We will lead. There is a pent up need for this. There has to be a resolution for the free versus pay debate otherwise we cannot afford to pay for things like news bureaus in Kabul.”

A Google spokesperson said earlier this week: “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute.

“Publishers put their content on the web because they want it to be found, so very few choose not to include their material in Google News and web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we don’t.”

Mr Miller said there were different ways to charge people for content online and that was what News Corp was exploring. However, Last week Mr Murdoch warned that his plans to charge for access to content across all of his newspaper sites, by the end of next June, could now be delayed.

During a conference call to discuss News Corp first quarter financial results, the media magnate said he couldn’t promise to meet his own deadline – but did say it remained a work in progress and “we are all working very hard” on delivering the pay solution.

There is already a partial paywall in place on one of his newspaper sites, The Wall Street Journal. Web users without a subscription can only access the first paragraph of articles if they arrive via the newspaper’s site. However, if they access an article via a link posted on Google, unsubscribed readers can see the full copy.

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hes been threatening this and now hes going to follow through..remains to be seen if others will copy him now..we could see the end of free news on the internet..from the msm at least anyway..no loss probably

401

~ by seeker401 on November 17, 2009.