In an unprecedented move, a major news source is planning to completely turn its back on the internet instead of attempting to grow with the times.
Rupert Murdoch is planning to launch a paid content strategy sometime next year and in a recent Sky News interview he announced that Google would be blocked from the site:
Murdoch claimed that readers who randomly reach a page via search have little value to advertisers. Asked by Sky News political editor David Speers why News hasn’t therefore made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: “I think we will.
This apparently in response to Google’s disagreements with them over links to content; Josh Cohen, a Google Senior Business Product Manager wrote on the Google European Public Policy Blog that news publishers:
“like all other content owners, are in complete control when it comes not only to what content they make available on the web, but also who can access it and at what price.. for more than a decade, search engines have routinely checked for permissions before fetching pages from a web site. Millions of webmasters around the world, including news publishers, use a technical standard known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to tell search engines whether or not their sites, or even just a particular web page, can be crawled. Webmasters who do not wish their sites to be indexed can and do use..two lines to deny permission.”
Murdoch and several other news sources claim Google is nothing more than a scraper site, and that the snippets posted with a link in Google News are preventing readers from paying for their content. Whether an online publication can actually support itself without Google remains to be seen.
Tags: Google, Murdoch, news corp, robots.txt
