Murdoch Expects Delay in Pay-Wall Plans

Rupert Murdoch’s aggressive plans to make content on all News Corp.‘s news sites available only for a fee will not become a reality as soon as he had hoped.

The original target to put content behind pay walls by next June may not be met, Murdoch said this week, though he declined to give any reason for the delay, writes The Guardian.

In its fiscal first quarter, News Corp. managed to increase profits by 11% - beating analyst projections - thanks in part to Twentieth Century Fox’s Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, which was the highest grossing international animated film of all time.

“The economies in which we do business are clearly in better shape than they were a year ago,” Murdoch said [pdf]. “We have further positioned our operations to take advantage of the improvements we are seeing globally.”

Newspaper earnings, however, plummeted from $134 million to $25 million. Murdoch said that advertising was picking up sooner than he had expected.

The company’s cable group, including the Fox News Network, saw profits jump 41%, to $495 million. But the TV group reported a 54% drop in operating income, to $38 million, largely because of reduced automotive, movie and political advertising.

MySpace struggled in the quarter, continuing to lose revenue and failing to deliver the minimum amount of web traffic it promised under a Google agreement three years ago. News Corp. is emphasizing a shift in MySpace strategy, looking to rebuild the site around entertainment, adding online communities around music, video and games, writes the Los Angeles Times.