The Grinch who stole content
Billionaire Rupert Murdoch has decided he doesn't want his News Corp stories showing up in Google News any longer.
In an interview on Sky News Australia, Murdoch blasted Google for taking a free ride on his content and claimed that surfers who read a News Corp story they had simply stumbled upon via a search provided next to no value for advertisers.
Google delivers more than a billion consumer visits to newspaper websites each month and says it believes doing so offers publishers the chance to snag new readers with compelling content, which then gives sites increased ad revenue and possibly even a subscription boost.
But Murdoch, it seems, disagrees with Google and says he will start looking for ways to hide his publications' stories from the search engine. Not that this is difficult to do. Google's founders have oft repeated how easy it is for any site to programme in a couple of lines of code and make content invisible to Google's news pool.
"We'd rather have fewer people coming to our web sites - but paying," Murdoch said in the interview, adding "they shouldn't have had it free all the time," because "the fact is, there isn't enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the websites profitable."
