There's an interesting story developing out of News Corporation - Rupert Murdoch, the outspoken head of The Times and The Sun, has vowed to remove all of his companies' content from the Google search engine.
The Telegraph reports that it all centres around the 'free versus paid content' debate.
Jonathan Miller, News Corp's chief digital officer, said, 'there is real tension'.
Murdock argues that most of the traffic that arrives at his sites is wasted as the reader does not stay. Murdoch claims that there will be no commercial loss.
Google says that if News Corporation wants to have its content removed it can but emphasised web search is a 'tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute'.
Google has also argued in the past that it pays newspapers billions in revenue from its Pay-Per-Click advertising embedded into news sites.
I want to explore the possibility of the UK domestic and commercial news and magazine sites following News Corps lead - would business owners dare?
I suggest not as it would have to work extremely hard to create loyalty - something that it, as an industry, has found hard to do since launching online businesses.
For a start, magazines which are trying to switch to online have tried to retain control of how their communities evolve rather than going to its potential clients websites and interacting.
Also, Internet savvy businesses have realised that their news can easily get noticed using the Google search engine and a little bit if imagination when distributing their news releases.
There's no doubt that there will be takers if gardening media switched to a pay-per-view model but the big question is, will the mass be significant enough to maintain the current business? - I think not.
What do you think?
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