Murdoch preparing for Google exodus

Murdoch to wave bye-bye to Google?
Murdoch to wave bye-bye to Google?

Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, has been speaking about the role Google will have in his company's online life and it looks as if all ties could be severed with the search engine.

Speaking to Sky News Political Editor David Speers, Murdoch outlined his plans for News Corp websites in the future and shrugged off the idea that being on Google was a positive thing for his company, explaining: "What's the point of having someone come occasionally who likes a headline they see on Google come to us?

"Sure, we can go out and say hey we've got so many millions of visitors we are better advertised and so on… the fact is there's not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the websites possible. We would rather have fewer people coming to our websites but paying."

Pay wall

When asked by the interviewer why Murdoch hasn't taken News Corp's websites off of Google altogether, he told Speers: "I think we will but that's when we will start charging."

Murdoch also noted that this is something the company is already partaking in. "We did it already with the Wall Street Journal," he explained. "We have a wall but it's not to the ceiling.

"You can get the first paragraph of every story but then if you are not a paying subscriber then you will get [prompted to] a subscription form."

When asked if this model is what we can expect, Murdoch replied: "Maybe. There's a doctrine called fair use which we believed could be challenged in the courts and banish this forever but there are other models so we will take this slowly."

Via Mumbrella

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.