News Corp has pulled the plug on its unprofitable news-aggregation service Knewz.com less than 18 months after launching it.

Knewz.com was intended to provide an alternative to Alphabet Inc.’s Google News and other digital news providers. It launched in January 2020, when News Corp executives were complaining publicly that Google and other digital-platform operators weren’t compensating the media company fairly for its content.

News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, struck a three-year deal in February with Google to license its content from various media properties to the tech giant. News Corp also agreed to produce new audio and video products as part of the pact.

Google agreed to pay News Corp tens of millions of dollars over the course of the deal, the Journal reported at the time.

In a statement Friday, News Corp said: “Knewz launched and grew in the midst of both a pandemic and a historic election, and advanced a distinct social purpose by offering true diversity of views at a time of extreme polarization, ultimately reaching and informing tens of millions of readers.”

About half a dozen staffers have been working on Knewz.com, including some News Corp employees on a part-time basis. Those people will continue with their other work, the company said. News Corp said it was encouraging the remaining staffers to apply for other company openings.

At its launch, Knewz.com aggregated articles from a range of sources including the Washington Examiner, Mother Jones and the Tampa Bay Times. It was available on desktop and mobile web browsers as well as via a mobile app. News Corp said Friday that it would continue to draw upon the technical insights it gained from operating Knewz.com.

The aggregation website displayed a notice Friday that stated: “We started Knewz 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. We certainly had provenance, but not profits, and so we bid Knewz farewell.”

Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at jeffrey.trachtenberg@wsj.com