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Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

I hope he carries through with this threat, because only actually doing it will provide hard evidence on who loses the most on this type of action: the content producer, or the content aggregator.

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.

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Only actually doing it will provide hard evidence on who loses the most on this type of action: the content producer, or the content aggregator

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.

People said the same thing about the MySpace deal, and look how profitable that turned out to be. I don't think you give Murdoch enough credit.

Isn't MySpace supposed to be dying under News Corp? Tell me if I'm wrong.

Myspace has been losing share, while facebook has been gaining a lot. If you look at it that way, mySpace is losing. I am not sure how well it is performing for Murdoch.

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.

I bet the guy didn't mention YouTube just to avoid giving competitors "free publicity". Just another example of how fixated his mind is on legacy business/marketing practices...

I doubt the content aggregator will lose much of anything by this happening. What this will be a test of is how dependent content sites are on aggregators, or if there are enough alternate ways for them to attract traffic that they don't need any specific aggregator (Google).

And if the other traffic sources are better at delivering higher value traffic, then they may even gain from it.

I think you're absolutely right, and it would be interesting (though impossible) to see this same thing happen with piracy and music industry. If there were a way to stop piracy and see how much the music industry sales dropped (assuming that they would), I wonder if they would get the picture.

I'm not sure the same outcome will hold. I would expect this to produce fewer views of Murdoch's sites, but I would expect the demise of piracy to produce more sales, because I don't think TPB and similar sites function mainly as search engines, and I think that distinction is important. Now, if YouTube were to be stopped (and all similar sites), I would expect that to hurt music sales in an analogous way to removing sites from Google.

Could be a bargaining chip or a referral fee play? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=931647

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