Murdoch To Say Goodbye To Google
By Kyle Aevermann In Search News
Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp, made news Monday in an interview with Sky News Austr Words To Send An Ex To Get Back Together alia, when he said he plans to make News Corp sites disappear from Google searches.
News Corp owns more than 100 media assets around the world including Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, and MySpace.com. Murdoch has suggested in interviews all year that he wanted to take all of his sites off search engines. From there, users would have to pay to view content on each site.
“There are no websites, news websites or blog sites anywhere in the world today making any serious money,” Murdoch said in the Sky News interview. “Some maybe break even, or make a couple of million.” Some would criticize Murdoch right there. Only a couple of million? Most people would love to make just a penny more than they put into their website.
In response to that quote, Mashable.com’s Stan Schroeder said, “It’s an important sentence because it shows that Murdoch is not only interested in making money; he’s interested in making obnoxious amounts of money. And we’re supposed to pay for it.”
Later on in the interview, Murdoch said, “We’d rather have fewer people coming to our websites, but paying.” He was referring to “search people” who click on a News Corp link through the search engine. “They don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content.”
When asked why doesn’t he just block the sites from search engines, Murdoch said, “I think we will. But that’s when we’ll start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get the first paragraph of any story, but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com, you get a paragraph and a subscription form.”
Murdoch, who is the 132nd richest person in the world according to the Forbes 400 report for 2009, seems to have forgotten about the global economic meltdown and how most people are working at trying to save money.
Hitwise immediately checked into the WSJ’s traffic and found that Google and Google News are the top traffic providers, bringing more than 25 percent of traffic to the site each week. They also stated that more than 44 percent of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are “new” users who haven’t visited the site in the last 30 days.
“Mr. Murdoch is not ready to accept any of the changes brought forth by the Internet and the social media movement,” said Schroeder. “Moreover, he doesn’t seem to understand how some parts of it work. He’s got the manpower to announce a war, but I’m afraid his army will be fighting windmills.”
A Google spokesperson also released a statement yesterday in response to Murdoch’s statement. “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organizations, 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.”
Google ended their statement with this: “If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically, all they need to do it tell us.”
No Comment