News Corp Has Demanded Search Engines Pay for News Content
News organizations have demanded for over a decade for search engines and social media sites to pay for the privilege of accessing their content, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp was once one of the few main figureheads for that rolling battle that grew to include MySpace antagonist Facebook among other social platforms.
Back in 2009, Murdoch was quoted saying “the aggregators and plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid content, it will be the content creators — the people in this hall — who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs who triumph.”
News Corp’s brands like The Wall Street Journal would be some of the first major papers to find success with an online subscription model, but Murdoch put pressure on big tech companies alongside the Australian government to force these payments. Like Facebook before it, Google threatened to block services in the country if it didn’t get what it wanted, but it wouldn’t be until 2021 when Murdoch penned a deal with Google that would grant news organizations some amount of money for the search engine using journalists’ work.
