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Murdoch versus search saga continues

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Murdoch versus search saga continues

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News Corp’s chief digital officer has outlined the case against search indexing.

According to News Corp’s chief digital officer, Jonathan Miller, Murdoch is ready to block access to his company’s sites soon.

“There is real tension surrounding the free versus pay debate. It will play out in the next two years. We believe that the value of high quality content is not recognised online… so something needs to happen,” said Miller. “I don’t believe the media industry can continue to exist in this way.”

“The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not reads one article and then leaves the site. That is the least valuable of traffic to us… the economic impact is not as great as you might think. You can survive without it.”

Miller admitted News Corp couldn’t make the change alone, expressing an expectation that other media companies will follow. He said without consumers paying for content, the financial reality was individual international news bureaus would close.

A spokesperson for Google expressed its views:

“Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every 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 dont.”

Sir Rupert Murdoch last week announced a delay for his paid content model.

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