Is Google appeasing Murdoch?

Has Murdoch won?

In what appears to be a clear concession to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., Google has said that newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through their news site.

Over the past few months, Rupert Murdock has been rallying against Google citing it as one of the reasons that News Corp. has made loses of GBP£2 billion in the first six months of the year. He accused the internet giant of "kleptomania" and acting as a "parasite" for including News Corp content in its Google News pages and has been advocating making users pay for online news content. If he was unable to do this, then Murdoch has said he would block Google access to his newspaper websites.

In what looks like a clear bid not to lose papers in Murdoch's media empire, including The Sun, The Times and the Wall Street Journal, Google has said that publishers can now prevent unrestricted access to subscription websites under the 'First Click Free' programme.

Five articles a day

Under the new guidelines, online news readers will only be able to click on five articles on a certain news site before being routed to payment or registration pages.

Josh Cohen, Google's senior business product manager, said, "Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free.

"Now, we've updated the programme so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing."

The move to force people to subscribe to news sites for content has furiously divided people with critics of the proposals saying the scheme is bound to fail, but Murdoch feels different.

"Some critics say people won't pay. I believe they will," he said in a recent interview to Sky News.

"Good journalism is an expensive commodity. We intend to expand this pay model to all our newspapers in the News Corp stable: the Times of London, The Australian and the rest," he added.

Newspapers are increasingly looking for new ways to make money from their online content amid a continuing decline in circulation figures and advertising revenues, and Murdoch believes charging people is the future. He has said in the past that News Corp. could produce "significant revenues from the sale of digital delivery of newspaper content" saying, "the digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive methods of distribution."

He has also said that once his News Corp. starts charging users, other websites will follow suit saying that quality media is not cheap and people would be willing to pay for "insightful and original perspectives".

So could charging for online news become the norm? Do you think Google are right to bend to Murdoch's will? Or do you think Murdoch is simply being too greedy? Join the debate - Online Content: To pay or not to pay?

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