News Corp. Shuts Down ‘Knewz’ Website Aimed at Google Ad Dollars

(Bloomberg) -- Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has shut down Knewz, a website that aggregated articles in a bid to reclaim readers and advertising dollars from Google.

Knewz began “as an experiment in news aggregation because we wanted to gather a diverse range of quality journalism, to highlight all sides of every story and to protect and project provenance,” the company said Friday. “We certainly had provenance, but not profits, and so we bid Knewz farewell.”

News Corp. has led efforts by publishers to be compensated by Google and Facebook for articles that generate ad dollars on their platforms. The company launched the site in January 2020, featuring headlines from a range of publishers. Its stated goal was to deliver news outside the confines of “rankings,” an apparent reference to search results from Google.

Knewz.com promised news that was “free of bias bubbles” that “frustrate so many discerning readers and thoughtful publishers.” When it launched, the website was pilloried on social media for its name and bright yellow design.

In its farewell note to readers, the site pointed readers to News Corp. publications like The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, which it called “some of the world’s most trusted news sources.”

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