Rupert’s Never Googled Anyone

Michael Wolf writes about the media and I tracked this back reading about Sir Rupert’s new idea about charging people for his UK newspaper’s web content.

“Rupert continues his war with the Internet. Over the weekend, he told an interviewer (the interviewer, on Sky News Australia, works for him) that as part of his campaign to charge users for reading his content, what he plans to do is to block Google from indexing his newspapers.

As of a year ago, Murdoch had never used Google—never once, by himself, run an Internet search—and so it might be reasonable to assume he doesn’t know what’s involved here.

It is quite possible he doesn’t realize—and can’t fathom—that removing News Corp.’s newspapers from Google means that, in the largest part of the information market, they would cease to count, cease to be a factor, that their absence would not register as a hole.

Nor, it is possible, does he realize that as much as 90% of his traffic comes from Google and other search engines, that even if his goal is to sell content, there is really no other way to direct people to it than through search engines.

So his idea is something like wanting to sell newspapers but not wanting to let people see them on the newsstand where they might read the headlines for free.”

Let’s see what actually happens, in six months do you think they will all still be trying to charge for news?