Rupert Murdoch's Google Vision Proves to Be Prophetic

Survey finds 44 percent of Google News readers don't click past the headlines

Uncle Rupert's invisibility cloak may not look so insane after all.

A new study says 44 percent of  Google News readers scan the headlines on the news aggregators site without clicking through to the source site.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch famously threatened to quit Google last year by making his news site invisible to the Silicon Valley giant. Murdoch complained -- before trying to get a Microsoft pay day -- that despite Google's ability to increase traffic to some news sites, the numbers are difficult for companies to capitalize on.

The Outsell survey of 2,787 American news readers found that 57 percent of people get their headlines from sites such as Google and Yahoo.

But before Murdoch can jump up and down in vindication of his prophetic vision, the survey also found that 75 percent of news aggregator readers would not pay for blocked content only available through subscriptions.
 

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