4 ms·

Rupert Murdoch and Google Part 2

13 points by stakent 17y ago

JCThoughtscream 17y ago
Vastly underplays the downside, I feel. The worst-case scenario isn't that News Corps sees that it's a bad idea after a few weeks or months of experimenting with a Google-free world - the worst-case scenario is that common sense wins out for once, the loss of Google indexing kills off readership, News Corps companies are brutally battered by sudden obsolescence /and their competitors fill in the void/. It takes, what, two weeks to instill a habit? How long will Murdoch stubbornly refuse to give grounds on the issue?
- hristov 17y ago
  Good point. And I don't think it will be the loss of indexing as much as the paywalls. When ppl hit a paywall they may just find another news site and never come back to news corp again. Anyways, the bright side is that this is really Murdoch's risk. There are no negative side effects I can think of. Online news is one business that does not suffer from lack of competition. So if Rupert wants to risk it, more power to him.
- trapper 17y ago
  Thing is, newspapers are already taking a battering. 1) Sticking with the status quo is obviously changing their business for the worse. 2) No one in the entire world has solved the huge reducing revenue problem for content producers, so we can't say there is a better way for sure yet. 3) The web seems to have a short memory. It's all about now, not about then. If they change back, I don't see much changing for them. I personally think that sticking everything behind a registration wall with no external indexing, while selling ads to go alongside their content should be a better model. It's essentially what facebook does, and it seems to be working for them. Google is great for the user, but not for the content owner used to large revenues for said content. Edit: Thinking about it, google really do "own" the worlds content; they monetize it for extremely little effort on their behalf. I love this, and so do you, but from a content producers point of view it's horrible. They used to be in control of distribution & now have to give a significant portion of the revenues they once had to a company who merely index the information, or others that make near-automated efforts to aggregate it. The only way they can possibly get back that revenue is to wall the garden.
  - Angostura 17y ago
    I really don't see why they don't wall the garden, but leave a window for the spider to see into the garden. Let Google index it and advertise it. Let readers see the adverts and pay for the full content.
etherealG 17y ago
uh, sounds to me like you have the upside and the downside mixed up there. Them not taking control of the news market by realising they have already lost it sounds like an up to me. I'd rather have the power of where people find information in the hands of a company that responds to popular opinion than one that responds to the US government at will.
motters 17y ago
As soon as I see a paywall, either on a news site or an academic site, I just go elsewhere. Murdoch might enjoy a short term boost in profit if he forces readers to a paywall, but longer term he's just making his content irrelevant to most internet users (which is just about everybody these days) and so would lose media mindshare.
rg 17y ago
I pay for a subscription to Murdoch's WSJ, and get a paper copy delivered every morning as well as online access (cost is huge, $400/year). Even so, I read most WSJ stories because I find them linked from Google News where I have lots of special news-search sections defined. I just don't have the time to page through 75 sheets of paper every day (as I did twenty years ago), or poke randomly around the WSJ's very slow and poorly-organized web site (vastly inferior to NYT). If Murdoch's WSJ disappears from Google News, it will disappear from my world and very likely I'd just end my subscription. More subtly, when the WSJ writes about me (very occasionally), most of the value to me comes when their story is chosen to be placed outside their paywall and can be linked freely; if WSJ stories become uniformly inaccessible, there will be little incentive for sources to cooperate with WSJ reporters and columnists.

13 points by stakent 17y ago

Vastly underplays the downside, I feel. The worst-case scenario isn't that News Corps sees that it's a bad idea after a few weeks or months of experimenting with a Google-free world - the worst-case scenario is that common sense wins out for once, the loss of Google indexing kills off readership, News Corps companies are brutally battered by sudden obsolescence /and their competitors fill in the void/. It takes, what, two weeks to instill a habit? How long will Murdoch stubbornly refuse to give grounds on the issue?

hristov 17y ago
Good point. And I don't think it will be the loss of indexing as much as the paywalls. When ppl hit a paywall they may just find another news site and never come back to news corp again. Anyways, the bright side is that this is really Murdoch's risk. There are no negative side effects I can think of. Online news is one business that does not suffer from lack of competition. So if Rupert wants to risk it, more power to him.
trapper 17y ago
Thing is, newspapers are already taking a battering. 1) Sticking with the status quo is obviously changing their business for the worse. 2) No one in the entire world has solved the huge reducing revenue problem for content producers, so we can't say there is a better way for sure yet. 3) The web seems to have a short memory. It's all about now, not about then. If they change back, I don't see much changing for them. I personally think that sticking everything behind a registration wall with no external indexing, while selling ads to go alongside their content should be a better model. It's essentially what facebook does, and it seems to be working for them. Google is great for the user, but not for the content owner used to large revenues for said content. Edit: Thinking about it, google really do "own" the worlds content; they monetize it for extremely little effort on their behalf. I love this, and so do you, but from a content producers point of view it's horrible. They used to be in control of distribution & now have to give a significant portion of the revenues they once had to a company who merely index the information, or others that make near-automated efforts to aggregate it. The only way they can possibly get back that revenue is to wall the garden.
- Angostura 17y ago
  I really don't see why they don't wall the garden, but leave a window for the spider to see into the garden. Let Google index it and advertise it. Let readers see the adverts and pay for the full content.

etherealG 17y ago

uh, sounds to me like you have the upside and the downside mixed up there. Them not taking control of the news market by realising they have already lost it sounds like an up to me. I'd rather have the power of where people find information in the hands of a company that responds to popular opinion than one that responds to the US government at will.

motters 17y ago

As soon as I see a paywall, either on a news site or an academic site, I just go elsewhere. Murdoch might enjoy a short term boost in profit if he forces readers to a paywall, but longer term he's just making his content irrelevant to most internet users (which is just about everybody these days) and so would lose media mindshare.

rg 17y ago

I pay for a subscription to Murdoch's WSJ, and get a paper copy delivered every morning as well as online access (cost is huge, $400/year). Even so, I read most WSJ stories because I find them linked from Google News where I have lots of special news-search sections defined. I just don't have the time to page through 75 sheets of paper every day (as I did twenty years ago), or poke randomly around the WSJ's very slow and poorly-organized web site (vastly inferior to NYT). If Murdoch's WSJ disappears from Google News, it will disappear from my world and very likely I'd just end my subscription. More subtly, when the WSJ writes about me (very occasionally), most of the value to me comes when their story is chosen to be placed outside their paywall and can be linked freely; if WSJ stories become uniformly inaccessible, there will be little incentive for sources to cooperate with WSJ reporters and columnists.