14 DAY TRIAL // Old media giants have been clamoring on about how search engines, Google being the biggest target, have been making money for years on the backs of the hard-working news agencies and how they're not going to stand for it any longer. Of course, there's a great reply to this, one that Google itself made on numerous occasions, namely that nobody is forcing them to have their content indexed by search engines. And, now, News Corp. is saying it may just no longer do that.
News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch made some interesting comments in a recent interview, claiming that readers coming from search engines were of very little value for the advertisers. When asked why the News Corp. proprieties didn't then just remove themselves from the Google's search results, he replied, “I think we will.” He went on to say that this would happen as the sites would start charging for the content and cited the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corp., as an example.
This would seem like a pretty determined affirmation, but there are very small chances of this actually happening. First of all, as Paid Content notes, the Wall Street Journal isn't completely cut off from Google just because it has a pay wall put up, something that Murdoch seems somewhat confused on. In fact, the WJS still relies on Google traffic a great deal, as, for the moment, the newspaper uses a hybrid pay-wall system in that most of the content is freely available to anyone and only a part of the stories are only available to paid subscribers.
But the main reason why News Corp., or any other news organization, for that matter, won't do this is because, for all their bravado, they know very well how much they rely on Google and the other search engines and that they can't afford to suddenly become basically invisible to the web. The fact is they have no problem with Google sending millions of readers their way, but they'd rather have the search engine pay them for it as well. But Google can do very well even without the biggest newspapers in the world, something that can't be said the other way around. It remains to be seen how this will play out, but News Corp. hiding its content from Google is one of the most unlikely scenarios.