Report: News Corp. to Block Google News "Within Months"

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on November 13, 2009 - 9:52am.

London - Days after News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) chairman Rupert Murdoch said he plans to block stories from his stable of newspapers from appearing in Google's news index, the company's chief digital officer, Jonathan Miller, echoed the position and said the move would come in "months and quarters -- not weeks," the Telegraph reported. "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," Miller said at the Monaco Media Forum, according to the Telegraph's coverage.

Miller also said that he hopes News Corp.'s move will lead other publishers to follow suit.

Murdoch said earlier this week that the company wouldn't be able to meet a June 2010 deadline to have News Corp. newspaper online content behind a paywall, but that the company is working towards a for-pay solution.

A Google spokesperson this week noted that Google News sends users to newspaper websites at a rate of about 100,000 clicks per minute.

"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," the company said.

Poll: Is Murdoch Making A Smart Business Move By Blocking Google's News Index?

Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/t8255 (Telegraph.co.uk)

http://snipurl.com/t822l (TechCrunch)