Murdoch: 'Not enough advertising in the world' to turn profits online

Posted by Lisette García on November 9, 2009 at 11:54 AM

News Corp. titan Rupert Murdoch has taken a more aggressive stance against online news aggregators in the wake of his delayed paywall plans for The Wall Street Journal, SkyNews today reported.

Following publishing division losses reported in July, Murdoch had announced plans to monetize all his online content, Marketing Vox reported in August. However, that dream never materialised due to the many workarounds available in the cyberworld, as described by blogger Mathew Ingram in June 2008.

Now, Murdoch, who once said it didn't matter that his material was available through Google, is starting to sound more and more like The Associated Press, who has taken on a battle royale against the search engine giant, as reported by Newsweek in October.

The quick fix apparently involves coding a Robots Exclusion Standard at the site's root, as explained by FastCompany in October. Taking that leap, however, involves risking less readership and, in turn, reducing incidental exposure to a newspaper's online ads.

Murdoch has apparently made peace with that likely eventuality, telling SkyNews: "There's not enough advertising in the world to make all the Web sites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our Web sites but paying."

Murdoch said News Corp. will likely not permit Google's bots to crawl the conglomerate's news sites once pay walls are in place, according to this SkyNews video, posted by Gawker.