November 15, 2009 by Matt Thomas
In typical style Rupert Murdoch has poured petrol on the free vs paid news content debate – a conversation that that was already pretty fiery to be honest – by claiming that he is fully prepared to remove all NewsCorp content from Google possibly even ‘within months’. The comments were elaborated on in a statement from Jonathon Miller, NewsCorp’s Chief Digital Officer…
“There is real tension surrounding the free versus pay debate… It will play out in the next two years. We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognised online, so something needs to happen.”
Mr Miller acknowledges that the corporation will not be able to go it alone in this particular crusade, stating that NewsCorp hopes to ‘lead’ the rest of the media industry in this new direction. The company does however seem to believe that NewsCorp’s business model will not be terminally hampered by missing out on the traffic that Google provides, claiming that the traffic generated by Google tends to be low value users who read one article and then leave the site.
Whether they actually believe this or they’re just sabre rattling is unclear, though predictably Google disagrees – “Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute.” – Google Spokesperson.
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