Following Rupert Murdoch‘s comment that he might in future hide his news sites from Google, there’s obviously been a fair amount of discussion about it.  Ben Kunz’s take on the issue, including a look at how Sony manages to give away free content AND shift inventory is worth a read.

However, the obvious question is, could this become something of an own goal? Answers from Hitwise and Alexa say quite possibly yes.

Hitwise looked at Murdoch’s flagship US title, The Wall Street Journal, and found that both Google and Google News are the top traffic drivers.  More importantly, Google is responsible for driving new readers Murdoch’s way – with over 44% of Google traffic coming from people who haven’t visited the WSJ in the past 30 days.

That last point is important – with 88% of newspaper reading time happening in print (note – reading time, not actual readers), the way we consume online media is, outside a community of news nerds, such as myself, very different.

The other month, UK media blogger Malcolm Coles looked at the online editions of the UK national newspapers and found that over 6/10 readers only read a single page, or article, and leave again. The conclusion is that there is less brand loyalty online for news.  We search for what we look for, we consume it, and we quickly move onto doing something else.  And if we encounter a paywall, we can easily find that content for free somewhere else.

The Wall Street Journal at least does have a core of – paying – readers.  Looking at the UK tabloid, The Sun, Google is responsible for close to 20% of ‘upstream’ visits to the site according to Alexa. For The Times (see image below), that figure increases to over a quarter.

Given this much more single-minded way we now consume news, it will be interesting to see how Murdoch’s sites fare if he does pull them away from search. From the evidence, if he really goes ahead with it, he might have to do an about turn very quickly.

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