Everyone Still Wary Of Murdoch’s Bing Deal

The big news right before Thanksgiving turned us all into sleepy zombies was Rupert Murdoch‘s plans to take all his News Corp. and Dow Jones business off of Google’s search engines, which were stealing all his lucky charms content.

Murdoch was so angry about the inability to make money off of Google’s Web traffic in fact, that he was hitting them where it hurts: by moving over to their competitor Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Would any other big papers follow suit? Michael Liedtke from The Associated Press (one of the other media companies flirting with the idea of moving to Bing) says it’s unlikely: Google still provides 21 percent of traffic to news sites, with Bing providing only 2 percent.

Meanwhile, Bing isn’t providing any financial bonus to have newspapers move to their site, so essentially the only reason a paper would do so would be to spite Google. A little bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face, since taking your links off of Google’s search engines would be paramount to disappearing into the Internet ether at this point.

And Murdoch seems to know this. As of last week, Liedtke writes, Googling the phrase “financial news” comes up with an advertisement from Murdoch-owned paper The Wall Street Journal. So even if they don’t want to appear on Google’s search engines, News Corp. is still paying the company for ad space.

Read More: Don’t bet newspapers will get rich shunning Google –Associated Press

Previously: Other Media Companies Look To Join Murdoch’s Google Block, News Corp. Digital Chief: Content Will Be Gone From Google Soon

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