News Corp Not Keeping Up with Technology

News Corp’s CEO Rupert Murdoch sat down with Sky News the other day to talk about the News business and the internet.  You can find the video below, but we are going to give you the jist of it because frankly it made us laugh.  News corp owns the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News and many other news outlets for those of you who were not aware.  There is a chance that these sites will no longer be able to be found on Google or other search engines for that matter.

In the interview, Murdoch said that he was not happy with how his content was being found on search engines and other places on the web, but what I assume he was not aware of is how much traffic google is sending to the WSJ.  According to Hitwise, Google accounts for 25% of the traffic sent to WSJ.  This is a substantial amount of visitors to the site, but it will all be lost if he gets his way.  Rupert Murdoch told the interviewer after a question of blocking the search engines that “I think we will”.  This is just crazy talk because people are no longer willing to pay for news.  Even loyal subscribers think what News corp is planning on doing is just out there.  This is just a problem with the style of businesses that CEO’s like Murdoch are used to.  They are in the generation that was not used to the internet and how it works.  They are just catching up to speed and do not like what they see.  If the board of News Corp was smart, they will decline his proposals and maybe hint that it is time for Murdoch to retire from this post.  They need to take their media organization in a new direction and old style thinking is not going to do it.  News Corp will become a sinking ship if they carry out their plans to cut off search engines.  See the interview below for yourself.  Please comment on what you think as we would love to know.

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