Murdoch: We’ll probably remove our sites from Google’s index
mumbrella.com.au
mumbrella.com.au
I think that News Corp will be the biggest loser, and I think it would be really good if they got to learn this lesson the hard way, but I also think the people in the blogosphere banging their chests and proclaiming the final demise of Old Media are wrong, yet again.
If I was a betting man I would put my money on Murdoch loosing money. This is what happens when some CEO who doesn't know anything about how the web or how search works goes on a rampage. I wonder if Murdoch even knows what a browser is. (Reference to Google's "What is a browser?" video series.)
Edit:
I was just laughing while watching the video. Murdoch didn't even use YouTube's name. He said "that, that huge video site that was such a runaway success." What I get out of it is he's just jealous of Google. I bet he wants to buy them out and add them to his portfolio.
You have to give kudos for him trying to get into a new market.
As for how he will lose if he removes his sites from google, time will tell. I assume he has done a lot of work looking at the area.
And if the other traffic sources are better at delivering higher value traffic, then they may even gain from it.
Going pay-only is a risky strategy, everyone knows that, but the only way they'll know if it works if they do it. Business isn't always about accepting the status quo, sometimes you have to gamble.
If Newscorp has 10 million visitors per time period, and makes a net of $0.01 per visitor, that's better than nothing, but if they can go down to 1 million visitors per time and net $0.15 per visitor, it's better. Murdoch seems to think that they can do the latter. I don't have any data to refute him, and neither, I'd guess, does anyone else in this thread.
It's possible that Murdoch is totally off his rocker, but it's usually a fair baseline strategy to assume that the guy who runs a multi-billion dollar company has a bit of business acumen.
When Murdch originally bought the WSJ he said he would bring the pay walls down on WSJ.com:
"(WSJ.com) is an excellent site but we charge for it, which limits it to about a million in circulation. We are studying and we expect to make that free, and instead of having a million, having 10 or 15 million people in every corner of the earth keeping up to date minute by minute with all business and economic news from around the world. We think that will attract very large sums or, relatively large sums, anyway of advertising revenue."
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-nws-dj-murdoch-we-expect-...
I'm very curious to see what convinced him to do a complete 180. It was only two years ago when he made that statement.
I for one hope he does go through with this!! I think its just going to end up hurting his core business more...which is a good thing really. He is just accelerating the demise of the paper/tabloid and big media as we know it.
I think a lot of people will have a different opinion, but I think this is great news.
Journalism isn't supposed to have a point of view. It's supposed to give you the facts and stay neutral.
I'd think that the random surfers are MORE likely to click an ad. After all, they aren't committed to your site -- They got there by accident. If a related ad is there, it seems likely that they would follow it more readily than someone who went to that site specifically to get their news.
This man runs his news(!) organizations to spread his personal ideologies as opposed to actually providing news. The only thing he really cares about is maximizing profit (nothing wrong with that), to say that his action was a result of his love for printed media is pretty silly, really.
Murdoch's news outfits may be blatantly biased, and overlap his own ideology to some substantial degree, but the primary goal is pandering to the audience's sensibilities (read: profit), not promoting his politics. Step back and think about it. Has commentary on Fox News ever convinced anyone to change their mind?
I don't see any point of trying to threaten Google. Just be a man, mate, the Aussie way.
Some fictitious scenarios:
1) they give away the news, only ad revenue from 100% of current readers who are mostly too cheap to pay (that's me!)
2) they sell the news to 5% of current readers, targetted ad revenue doesn't alter as these readers buy stuff, and buy stuff online to boot
I'm going to go ahead and assume that most people come to the prestige newspapers The Times (of London) by a search for the papers name - now they're not going to delist themselves just stop putting all their stories up online. Indeed I'd expect them to have lead summaries still in SERPs. If most paying customers and most ad following customers come via the reputation and not specific stories then it seems there's little to lose.
Even if it works but not as well as liked it's only going to work better if more news centres follow suit - the less freely available well written news online the greater the value of pay news (and the less they'll need to charge).
Personally I think Murdoch can probably pull this off for some of his larger news providers - do I like it, not one bit.
Seems to be a gross sense of entitlement amongst consumers if you ask me. It kills off quality content providers in favor or knee-jerk social media and mediocre content generated by algorithms to maximize SEO/SEM juju.
My point is, there are two sides to this coin and somewhere in between is a happy medium. I don't feel either side has the best solution — yet.
The situation you describe is what is generally known as "supply and demand". If low-quality content is all that many people actually want, the supply is nearly inexhaustible and so the value of content does exactly what you'd expect. There doubtless remains a smaller market for higher-quality content who can be convinced to pay for it, but that's not the mainstream and probably never will be--and while outfits like the WSJ and NYT may be the best of the old mainstream stuff, they're still on the wrong side of the shifting market.
Most of the traditional media is in the unenviable situation of being neither sufficiently high-quality to reach people who will pay, nor sufficiently cheap to reach the new mass market. The only sense of entitlement going on is the media companies bellyaching that the market has moved and left them behind.
Murdoch is a hack and doesn't have the cojones to provide real quality, but at his age he'll probably be dead before his mistakes fully catch up with News Corp. In the meantime, if quality is what you're after, have you considered buying a subscription to The Economist?
I don't know, but some blogs (like TechCrunch) seem to be doing fine. Maybe the big news outlets just need to find a way to operate more economical, so that they can survive off online ads?
If I was a content producer (which I'm not so my experience here is limited) but I would be upset by sites like Digg, Reddit, Mahalo, etc. that simply aggregate news, drive up my bandwidth costs, and leave me with fleeting traffic. There's nothing really meaningful in this relationship. It's like a superficial date that never gives you a kiss at the end of the night, but always expects you to pay for dinner.
I won't pay a penny to a newspaper to read about Britney.
That makes you an exceptional case. Most North Americans haven't paid for news content in well over a century. Since the advent of advertising-based newspapers, we've paid for distribution, but not the content itself.
The economics behind the scenes may very well be that his dollar pays only for printing and distribution, but that's not what people think they're paying for.
I would argue that the distinction is irrelevant in this case. If the news was priced according to the cost of creating content tomorrow, the number of buyers would be correspondingly smaller than it is today.
The guy on the street who also cruises the web thinking that, except it's more like "I'm bored without PC, let's toss a quarter out to see what the filter wants to put out".
And the thing is, THIS is how it's been for a while, long before the Internet. The Internet only made it obvious. So the genie fortunately isn't going back into the bottle. Nice genie, it bring us good stuff.
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