Rupert Murdoch puts the gate up.
In case you missed the interview, billionaire and global media mogul Rupert Murdoch announced that he will be stopping Google from indexing his sites. In an interview with Sky News Australia, Murdoch says he plans to make News Corp sites invisible to Google’s search engine.
News Corp’s network consists of more than 110 national and suburban newspapers. The New York Post and the ever popular and extremely (organically) visible site, The Wall Street Journal. Not to mention News Corp. owns the Fox Corporation.
In the interview he claims that they will allow for the first paragraph to come up on the search engines. I’m assuming he’s talking about the meta description. Anything after that is subscription-based. This is something I’ve become familiar with as (New York) Newsday has recently implemented a similar strategy. Their subscription based model is to help subscriptions to either their weekly (at-home) delivery or the triple-play package (TV, Internet & Phone) by their parent company, Cablevision Systems Corporation (NYSE: CVC).
I think we will. But that’s when we’ll start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get the first paragraph of any story but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com, you get a paragraph and a subscription form.
My favorite quote from his interview is “There are no news Websites or blog Websites anywhere in the world making any serious money, some may be breaking even or making a couple of million.” This just shows you the kind of man this is. Making a couple of millions sits right next to breaking even, in his eyes. I would think sites and papers like WSJ.com or NewYorkPost.com are doing much better than breaking even, but obviously my warped perspective must start above a couple of million.
murdoch interview, news, news corp, rupert murdoch, SEO For Newspaper Sites, sky news, wsj.com
If I am a stock owner who has 2,000 shares. I am probably an owner of a sliver of one percent of his business. A couple million seems like a waste of the businesses capital to me. Even more so because my perspective can only actually afford 20 shares of his business. Glad your blogging again. You got to get more of your sarcasm in there though. That’s you personality and that’s what I want to read.