Bing, News Corp Talks Offer Hope for Media

Microsoft is offering News Corp and other media companies money to yank their content from Google’s search engine and list it instead on Bing. The offer, likely prompted by a threat from Rupert Murdoch to remove content from Google, “is all about Microsoft hurting Google’s margins,” said one publisher. But it's also good news for media providers, who could find themselves the object of a bidding war for copy, reports the Financial Times.

The deal “puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them,” the publisher tells the Financial Times. Google, which has acted unconcerned about Murdoch’s threat to pull News Corp content, continued to downplay the importance of news. “Economically, it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue,” Google’s UK director Matt Brittin said last week.
(More Google stories.)