Will News Corp. Pubs Be Pulled From Google News?
News Corp. will likely pull all of its newspaper content from Google News once its switches from an ad-supported to a subscription-based model, according to Chairman Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch on Friday sat down with Sky News, of which News Corp. is a partial owner, to discuss the impact of the Internet on news, among other things.
The Australian media tycoon has been critical of the Google News aggregation model, as well as similar offerings from Microsoft and Ask.com, which he says is tantamount to stealing. When asked why he has not pulled News Corp.-owned material from Google News, Murdoch said that it will likely happen down the road.
“I think we will,” Murdoch said. “But that’s going to be when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal.”
Google has argued that its news aggregator simply points users to content online and actually helps drive traffic to news sites. Murdoch was not impressed by Internet traffic and said he was more interested in finding loyal readers.
If News Corp. and others are so concerned about Google aggregating their news, they can easily put a stop Google by adding an entry to their robots.txt file or through using meta tags. One has to wonder why News Corps. and other news organizations just don’t simply block Google instead of whining about them…