Google to allow publishers to limit free news access. Google is to allow publishers of paid for content to limit the amount of free access internet users have to their websites from Google News.
The move, announced by the Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen late yesterday, comes after mounting criticism of the search engine giant from newspaper publishers, not least the News Corporation chairman and chief executive, Rupert Murdoch. Just yesterday, Murdoch accused online aggregators such as Google News of "theft" of content, speaking at a US media regulators' workshop on the future of journalism in the internet age in Washington. Murdoch plans to put News Corp content, including from UK newspapers such as the Sun and the Times, behind a paywall and has threatened to remove it from Google's search index and Google News.
However, Cohen said publishers would be able to charge for their content and still make it available via Google following the changes announced yesterday. "Without us, the aggregators would have blank slides. More emerges on Microsoft’s dance with newspapers. We’ve been doing some more digging on the definitive moves by Microsoft to woo newspapers over to Bing and away from Google, a story we broke two weeks ago. Since then there have been some follow-up by various media outlets, notably the Financial Times this week which confirmed that Microsoft had had discussions with News Corp to “de-index” its news websites from Google.
Who approached who first? The FT said the impetus came from News Corp, although our information is that Microsoft is also talking to a range of newspaper publishers in Europe as well, such as German publishers like Axel Springer. So here is what our sources are coming up with. • There’s also been a lot of speculation about how Microsoft will lure newspapers into Bing. . • Despite their delight that there is finally a search engine in the market willing to take on Google’s preeminence, Newspaper publishers still have issues with the whole Bing idea. For Twitter, Sharing Data With Google Would Be Suicide. Guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal) has launched and sold several companies.
In 2000 he founded eNow, a search engine for the Real-time Internet in an age that predated RSS as a popular medium. As such he has had a decade to think about its implications. He ultimately sold the company (renamed Relegence) to AOL in 2006 and today runs his Incubator/Investment vehicle Futurity Ventures. He recently launched a new search engine for wisdom.
In a way we are all virtual stock holders in Twitter. Twitter is important. At this moment in time, Twitter has such a stronghold on this new form of real-time consumption that it has the potential to dominate the category. News Corp Wants To “Lead” The Media Industry To Its Own Demise. Once again, News Corp. is threatening to hide itself from the rest of the Web.
Earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch told an Australian interviewer that he might start blocking Google from the WSJ.com and his other news sites, even though Google accounts for about 25 percent of the traffic to the WSJ.com. Now his digital lieutenant Jon Miller is echoing his boss and warning that a move to block Google may come within the next few months. But he qualifies that by saying that News Corp must “lead” other media companies against Google for this to work.
In other words, News Corp can’t go it alone. I’m not sure what other media companies, other than the AP, might be willing to follow. In fact, Murdoch is such a sly fox, it is hard to say who he is really going after here. Any such boycott, which would entail nothing more than requesting that Google stop indexing their news sites and thus become invisible to most people on the Web, will only hasten the demise of most of Murdoch’s rivals. Col. Financial Times editor says most news websites will charge withi. The Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, has predicted that "almost all" news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.
Barber said building online platforms that could charge readers on an article-by-article or subscription basis was one of the key challenges facing news organisations. "How these online payment models work and how much revenue they can generate is still up in the air," Barber said in a speech at at a Media Standards Trust event at the British Academy last night.