Priyanka Writing
>Rupert Murdoch is the the chairman and CEO of News Corp. which includes Star TV, 20th century Fox, Fox channels, MySpace, Tata Sky (partly) and a lot more!
From quite some time he has been making indignant remarks against Google, Bing, Ask.com and other ‘usurpers’ of news content. Google retorted by saying that it was these usurpers that sent about 4 billion visitors to news sites!
In a nutshell the entire debate is about free online content. Really good, researched and analysed content is available free of cost to all. This is great from a larger point of view, where any simpleton computer user can access important info free of cost. However news corps are not able to monetize their sites well enough.
One of the ways to get some ROI on the articles is by asking readers to pay for the content. On these lines Wall Street Journal has started a ‘subscribe to read more’ policy.
Surprisingly if you take the title of a preview only article and copy paste in Google, it shows the entire article in its search field. Googlers can this way read the entire article, anyway!
The reason that Google displays this charged content for free is due to cloaking…
Google has strict policies against what’s known as cloaking: showing one web page to the crawler that indexes it but then a different page to a user. We do this so that users aren’t deceived into clicking through to a site that’s not what they were expecting.
Given the publishers ire at this arrangement, they have introduced a feature that allows only the first 5 clicks for free, but after that the user gets directed to a register/subscribe page. Read more at the Google Blog.
Below is a longish (30 mins) video of Rupert, where he explains his idea behind charging for online news.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7GkJqRv3BI&rel=0&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
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