Rupert Murdoch threatens to remove News Corp. stories from Google

 

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Posted on 9 Nov 2009 at 11:59

In an interview with Sky News in Australia, News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch hinted that when News Corp. starts charging visitors to its web sites for content, it will remove that content from search engines such as Google. Murdoch has complained for years that search engines and other content aggregators are stealing content from publishers, going so far as to call these sites "kleptomaniacs" and "plagiarists".

News content providers have seen profits drop dramatically in the last few years as advertisers have migrated from print to online, but Murdoch believes there isn't enough advertising to go around online either. "There are no websites - news websites or blog websites - anywhere in the world, making any serious money," he said. In the interview, he complains that, despite search engines pushing traffic to News Corp.'s websites, there simply isn't enough money in online advertising to make it profitable. "What's the point of having someone come occasionally who likes a headline they see in Google?" he asked.

However critics have pointed out that it's always been possible for any content company to remove its pages from search results by using a small text file on its web server, called a Robots.txt file, which instructs search engines to scan or ignore certain pages. Murdoch acknowledged this, and said that this would be what News Corp. sites would do once they started charging.

In our opinion, this is nothing new. Old media empires such as Murdoch's have long complained that they can't make as much money online as they used to make just selling newspapers and magazines. Murdoch is well aware of this, and also well aware of the different payment options available to his sites. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has long used a subscription model, which still relies on search engine results to drive readership but only gives away the first paragraph of a story for free. A subscription is needed to access the rest of the article.

The threat to remove content from Google will hardly trouble the search giant. Murdoch may be trying to save face after poor performance from its social networking site MySpace meant that News Corp. didn't hit minimum traffic guarantees, and therefore won't receive payments from Google under a deal signed in 2006. The deal promised a total of $900m over three years, as long as MySpace and some smaller online properties received a minimum number of visitors, which accounts for a third of MySpace's revenues. With MySpace losing more and more traffic to rival Facebook, Murdoch may end up losing more than $300m.

Online advertising will always trump offline advertising, as it can rely on better demographic data and therefore be better targeted. This means the shift from print to web is a constant, and publishers not ready to move in this direction will inevitably fail. Search engines and other aggregators complicate matters by removing the need to visit a newspaper's home page, thus reducing readers' "loyalty" to that brand, but they more than compensate for this by driving users to news sites who wouldn't normally visit them.

Author: Barry de la Rosa