Media mogul Rupert Murdoch made waves earlier this week when he publicly said he wanted to block News Corp.'s content from search engine spiders, specifically Google's. But Murdoch's decree is coming sooner rather than later, The Telegraph reports.
News Corp. will begin blocking its content from Google in the coming months and quarters, according to Jonathan Miller, the company's chief digital officer. Speaking at the Monaco Media Forum, Miller reiterated several of the points he made at ad:tech New York last week, namely that News Corp. believes there needs to be a major change in the battle between paid and free content.
The media conglomerate obviously falls on the "paid" side of the content argument, and believes its online offerings can survive without the traffic referred to its websites by Google. Miller went on to say that search engine traffic is practically useless to a company like News Corp.
"The traffic which comes in from Google brings a consumer who more often than not reads one article and then leaves the site," he said. "That is the least valuable of traffic to us."