Rupert Murdoch wants to remove all of News corp’s content from Google index ‘within months’.
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.”
I think if this does come true, it could have mammoth impact on the Newspaper industry’s future. If News corp’s bold move can bring google to share revenues with the news content owners, it could be a real shot in the arm for the industry. More likely though google would shrug at this as it has plenty of other sources in their index. It is a simple matter of supply and demand. Google holds the cards right now. But if the most of top news companies band together then may be they would have some leverage. Would this move by News corp rally others do the same? It will be interesting to see. The other thing it could do is to play MS against Google to get someone to pay to index their content (that would most probably be MS).