New York — According to a news report appearing Sunday in the Financial Times quoting person familiar with the situation, that Microsoft has initiated discussions with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. over a deal that would see the media magnet get paid to remove its news websites from Google, while continuing to publish it on Microsoft’s online properties, according to people familiar with the matter.
News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch has expressed he wants to make people pay for access to his news websites. Other publishers including The New York Times are also exploring for ways to charge for news online, convinced that they must not give news through search engines such as Google and Yahoo Inc.
The Financial Times first reported the story Sunday, stating that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them about removing their sites from Google. News Corp, which possess such papers as the Wall Street Journal and the Sun, started the discussions, which were at an early stage, the source said.
“This is all about Microsoft hurting Google’s margins,” the FT quoted a website publisher, who had been approached by Microsoft.
The talks are still at a very initial stage and may not result in a deal, according to these people. Among the most difficult issues, one of these people said, are the terms under which Microsoft would compensate News Corp., if at all, to feature its news content, which ranges from The Wall Street Journal to the Sun of the U.K.
It is still not apparent whether the discussions include News Corp.’s non-newspaper sites, such as its popular MySpace social-network or Fox television properties.
According to a person familiar with the talks, the discussions are another indication of a increasing thrust by news organizations to devise new revenue streams for their online news and information in response to the challenges posed by the Internet.
Microsoft, which relaunched its rival search engine Bing this year, has also reportedly approached other media giants about having their content removed from Google search results as well.
Microsoft representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For many months, executives from some of the nation’s most influential newspapers and periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press, have been criticizing Google and similar Web services for at least some of their deepening financial troubles.
Google sells ads associated to the news blurbs it “collects” from news sites. It links back to the Web sites from which it acquired the content but does not share ad revenue with them.
“Publishers place their content on the Web because they want it to be found,” Google said in a statement earlier this month. “Very few choose not to include their material in Google News and Web search. But if they tell us not to include it, we do not.”
Murdoch, which possesses newspaper, TV, and Internet conglomerate that consists of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, 20th Century Fox, Fox News, and Hulu, earlier this month warned that his sites may soon disappear from the search engine’s listings. Murdoch blamed search giants of “stealing” his company’s content during an interview with Sky News Australia. When he was asked why he just does not pull his Web sites from Google’s search results, he said: “I think we will. But that is when we start charging.”
Google and other Web portals state they are within their legal rights to post snippets of news stories, which help point traffic to news sites.
Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman, said Google has a “clear policy of respecting the wish of content owners” by allowing them to prevent their material from showing up in Google search results, though he declined to comment directly on the talks between Microsoft and News Corp.
“We believe search engines are of real benefit to newspapers, driving valuable traffic to their Web sites and connecting them with new readers around the world,” Stricker said.
The two companies have been said to be discussing a Web-search alliance in the past. During Microsoft’s failed bid for Yahoo in 2008, the tech giant was reportedly in “serious” talks with News Corp. to make a joint bid for Yahoo.
Ultimately, earlier this year, Microsoft signed a 10-year global web search partnership with Yahoo, a deal that U.S. and European antitrust regulators are evaluating.
Microsoft could not reached for comment late on Sunday. News Corp declined to comment. The source is anonymous because the talks are not public.