Rupert Murdoch, the Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, sat down with Sky News today to discuss how people should access internet news content.
Murdoch, who owns the WSJ.com, argues that people should have to pay some sort of marginal premium to access the content. He argues that people should have never had access to this content free of charge to begin with.
What he’s considering now is to end the partnership between Google and the WSJ, where Google would no longer be able to index WSJ.com content. That means the WSJ feed would not only disappear from Google News, but from the entire Google search.
Proponents of the search engines argue the search engines bring users to the sites, in turn generating advertising revenue for the newspapers.
Currently, about 20-percent of total WSJ.com traffic is estimated to originate from Google alone. Additionally, about 45-percent of total WSJ.com users are estimated to be new to the site, so Google specifically not only brings in a very sizable amount of traffic, but also many new prospects to the WSJ that could become paid customers.
On the other hand, Murdoch says he would rather have fewer but paying and more loyal readers.
