Forge Search Marketing
Rupert Murdoch Blocks Google
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch recently announced that he plans to remove his news websites from Google and other search engines’ search index in an attempt to prevent them from “stealing” his content.
“The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them. That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”
News Corporation has planned for some time to move all of its news websites to a “paywall” model where users must pay a subscriber fee in order to see the full version of an article. The paywall model has already been implemented in newspaper websites such as The Wall Street Journal, but is being bypassed by users that arrive at the article via search engines. According to Google, approximately 100,000 visitors per minute (a rather astounding number) arrive at the various news organization websites via search engines and if Mr. Murdoch’s wishes are granted, his sites will lose the majority of that traffic.
Murdoch suggests removing News Corp sites from Google
Google, naturally, could care less whether or not the content of News Corp’s sites are blocked considering it is a standard practice for “millions of webmasters“.
“If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically all they need to do it tell us…”
While an online pay-to-view model may be a potential alternative to the declining print media sales, removing those articles’ visibility from search and chopping off billions of visitors per month seems like a rather bold move to solve the “piracy” issue. Given the resources of News Corporation, one would assume that there is a better alternative to maintain the flow of traffic from the search engines while keeping their content exclusive to paying subscribers.
The issue at its core seems akin to that of the digital media industry’s struggling effort to fight against piracy. Even if websites like The Wall Street Journal manage to seclude its content to only paying users, all it takes is one person to post that content on a blog or competing news site for the value of the subscription to be nullified.