Rupert Murdoch will remove content from Google within “months”
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp will disappear from Google indexing sometime in the coming months.
Mr. Murdoch has made it very clear that he no longer has any interest in his content appearing in the Google search index, and that he also plans to erect a pay wall around his content as quality content should be paid for. Thanks to Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer, we now have a time frame for when this will happen.
According to The Daily Telegraph, Mr. Miller told the Monaco Media Forum on Friday that the changes would happen in “months and quarters – not weeks.” Mr. Miller defended this decision by saying, “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.”
Mr. Miller said that News Corp realized that it will be unable to do this on its own, and that other companies will have to follow them for it to work.
An unnamed Google spokesperson said earlier this week that it will comply with News Corps’ request. “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organizations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute.” The spokesperson continued, “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.”
Mr. Murdoch is either being a visionary and will bring about great change in how news on the Internet works, or he may be cutting his own throat. Only time will tell which it is, but without the support of other sites, my money is on the latter.
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November 13th, 2009
So, he would rather every consumer go to a different news source. He is only shooting himself and his company in the foot. I only read what is on Google News. That’s okay, there are plenty of other news sources probably carrying the same stories. He’s only putting himself in the position of failing and then having Google to buy his company for pennies on the share later on (okay, I’m making that up but why not).
November 13th, 2009
I am sure his competitors are rejoicing over this news.
November 13th, 2009
What a short sighted moron. And its ridiculous to think it would take any time at all to enforce. All he has to do is tell his IT staff to setup robots.txt and done.
Meanwhile, will he also honor other sites that may decide THEY no longer want THEIR news showing up on Murdoch’s sites?
From my BlackBerry Storm…
November 15th, 2009
I think it does not make a difference for Google since there are so many other news content from other sources they can use.