November 16th, 2009
Rupert Murdoch the founder and CEO of the world’s second largest media conglomerate News Corp. has said in his latest interview with Sky News that they will be blocking Google from indexing their sites.
This he said will be their strategic move to increase the profitability of their online versions of their newspapers. Somehow he believes that Google is doing more harm by sending tons of traffic to their websites because he thinks that it’s better to have small number of people who pay (paid subscribers) rather than tons of people who do not pay and read his (News Corp) news from Google News for free (even if Google provides a link back).
News Corp. own tons of newspapers, magazines, tv and radio stations worldwide. Newspapers like The Sun (UK), The New York Times (US), and The Wall Street Journal (US) are owned by News Corp. (full list here)
That’s an interesting strategy indeed. He is the only person I heard on internet who doesn’t want traffic and Google’s indexing of his sites :) Normally everyone is after traffic and always trying to improve their SEO to better rank in major Search Engines.
I personally think this strategy of R.Murdoch will do more harm to his websites’ profitability if he indeed will block all search engines from indexing his sites. Sure, he might have loyal customers who will read WSJ and New York times everyday, but any product and website needs advertising. And free advertising like what Google is doing for them is the best thing that any website can get. He only needs to tweak the website to make it free section and paid section. Perhaps free section could only have some brief news and full articles could be accessed only by paid members etc.
Bad for Google?
In his private mailing list, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo suggested that, this move by News Corp might be bad for Google and good for Google’s competitors. Because he believes, now is the time for Bing and Yahoo to approach News Corp directly and be the exclusive provider of News Corp’s news on their search engines. Obviously this would affect Google’s reach and Google’s competitors could effectively snatch some Search Engine Share from Google. (read his article here).
What is your opinion on this issue? Do you think R.Murdoch is doing a right move by blocking Search Engines? Do you think his move is a loss for Google? (R.Murdoch’s interview on YouTube after the jump) Read more »