6 ms·

Badda Bing: Microsoft woos newspapers by funding their stick to beat Google

10 points by azharcs 17y ago

ax0n 17y ago
Otherwise known as prolonging the death of an industry that refuses to innovate. How appropriate.
- papa 17y ago
  Alternately, I wonder if this move will hasten the newspaper's decline. If traditional newspapers/media remove themselves from the Google Index it creates a huge opportunity for new media outlets (huffingtonpost and other online verticals), smaller tier players, other intermediaries (bloggers and the like). It's not like consumers are going to stop using Google for these types of searches overnight. And it's not like they won't continue to find great content (albeit not from "blue chip" outlets like WSJ, NYTimes, etc.). Combine that with the decline in relevance of traditional outlets wrt the younger generation (I imagine the same dynamic that makes Jon Stewart the most highly regarded news broadcaster in the U.S. also pertains to the < 30something regard for traditional media brands) and you have a pretty dismal outlook for old media made even more dismal by the outright ceding of their Google traffic (if it comes to pass). But I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out. If you're a smaller, up-and-coming online media player though, you've got to be licking your chops.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  It would't be the first time that microsoft used its cash to prolong the death of something in order to set it against a foe. SCO definitely comes to mind here. You can look forward to reporting on google and ms becoming serioudly skewed by this.
steveitis 17y ago
The author seems not to understand that robots.txt is granular, and that Google even honors the X-Robots 'header' version. ACAP is pointless, or at least not the big deal improvement these guys want it to be.
- baguasquirrel 17y ago
  If the author doesn't understand it, then the newspaper industry probably understands it even less. Understand this for what it is: a propaganda war, intended to appeal to those "left behind" by the march of the internet.
mcantor 17y ago
I'm kind of embarrassed by the hackjob of an image attached to that article. Isn't TechCrunch supposed to be this kickass tech news outlet? That graphic is all the worst parts of "political cartoons," but without even a compelling illustration to go with it.
- pavs 17y ago
  What? TC is supposed to be this kickass tech news outlet? Says who?
InclinedPlane 17y ago
This is a huge mistake on Microsoft's part. The newspaper industry in the US is in an accelerating, long-term decline. Circulation has been steeply dropping since about 1993. And ad revenue, a newspaper's primary source of revenue, has been dropping like a rock. It's already half of what it was only 5 years ago. Even if the current trends improve a bit, the newspaper industry will be somewhere around 10% to 3% its current size a decade from now. Though given the accelerating decline in ad revenue it's possible that this process could proceed much more rapidly. Getting an exclusive right to content from a dying industry is the definition of a bad business move.
- chris100 17y ago
  Circulation has been steeply dropping Yes and no. 10 years ago, at best I'd buy and read one newspaper per day. Now I probably visit 10 newspapers' websites per day to read various news. While physical circulation is down, overall exposure may not be.
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    Yes, but do you BUY 10 newspapers a day? Hardly. Circulation is a source of revenue (currently a larger source of revenue for papers than online ads). Moreover, buying a physical paper encourages someone to spend more time with it, to read it thoroughly and to have greater exposure to the ads. Even today print ads are more valuable, per eyeball, than online ads. When you visit those 10 newspaper sites a day, how many ads do you click? How many ads do you even read? This is not to say that a paper couldn't survive with only online ad revenue, far from it. The key point is that the operations of those 10 newspapers whose sites you visit are no cheaper today than they were a decade ago. Most importantly, they are not cheap enough to be supported entirely by online ad revenue. And when you take away the print revenue and the circulation revenue, online ads are all that's left. You probably don't read the classified ads, the weather forecasts, the republications of identical national wire reports, or the beetle bailey cartoons at each and every one of those 10 newspapers. Yet each of those papers still puts out all of that material. And that costs money. It costs yet more money to arrange everything for a physical page and print tens or hundreds of thousands of physical copies of the paper every day. Papers could survive if they changed, but they don't want to change. Because if they concentrated on just the tiny fraction of work that they do that isn't redundant or unnecessary in the online world they would be much smaller operations than they are today. Not only that, but, odd as it sounds, not reprinting beetle bailey and all that other crap would cause them to lose a lot of subscribers in the short-term, even though it might be healthier in the long-term. So papers haven't changed much even while their industry has been radically transformed by technology. And most papers won't change much. It's questionable whether there exists a path between the way a given paper exists today and the sort of entity that could exist in the online world, it may be that it's easier to build something else from scratch. This deal with Microsoft is yet one more example of newspapers trying to avoid inevitable changes to their ways of doing business.
jpeterson 17y ago
This is yet more evidence that Microsoft still tragically misunderstands the web. How can they still be so far behind the curve? People don't search for news articles--they search for information (e.g. Wikipedia, local doctors, vendors, etc.) and for sites like Facebook (rather than typing out the URL). Colluding with a moribund print media industry will buy them nothing.

10 points by azharcs 17y ago

ax0n 17y ago

Otherwise known as prolonging the death of an industry that refuses to innovate. How appropriate.

papa 17y ago
Alternately, I wonder if this move will hasten the newspaper's decline. If traditional newspapers/media remove themselves from the Google Index it creates a huge opportunity for new media outlets (huffingtonpost and other online verticals), smaller tier players, other intermediaries (bloggers and the like). It's not like consumers are going to stop using Google for these types of searches overnight. And it's not like they won't continue to find great content (albeit not from "blue chip" outlets like WSJ, NYTimes, etc.). Combine that with the decline in relevance of traditional outlets wrt the younger generation (I imagine the same dynamic that makes Jon Stewart the most highly regarded news broadcaster in the U.S. also pertains to the < 30something regard for traditional media brands) and you have a pretty dismal outlook for old media made even more dismal by the outright ceding of their Google traffic (if it comes to pass). But I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out. If you're a smaller, up-and-coming online media player though, you've got to be licking your chops.
jacquesm 17y ago
It would't be the first time that microsoft used its cash to prolong the death of something in order to set it against a foe. SCO definitely comes to mind here. You can look forward to reporting on google and ms becoming serioudly skewed by this.

steveitis 17y ago

The author seems not to understand that robots.txt is granular, and that Google even honors the X-Robots 'header' version. ACAP is pointless, or at least not the big deal improvement these guys want it to be.

baguasquirrel 17y ago
If the author doesn't understand it, then the newspaper industry probably understands it even less. Understand this for what it is: a propaganda war, intended to appeal to those "left behind" by the march of the internet.

mcantor 17y ago

I'm kind of embarrassed by the hackjob of an image attached to that article. Isn't TechCrunch supposed to be this kickass tech news outlet? That graphic is all the worst parts of "political cartoons," but without even a compelling illustration to go with it.

pavs 17y ago
What? TC is supposed to be this kickass tech news outlet? Says who?

InclinedPlane 17y ago

This is a huge mistake on Microsoft's part. The newspaper industry in the US is in an accelerating, long-term decline. Circulation has been steeply dropping since about 1993. And ad revenue, a newspaper's primary source of revenue, has been dropping like a rock. It's already half of what it was only 5 years ago. Even if the current trends improve a bit, the newspaper industry will be somewhere around 10% to 3% its current size a decade from now. Though given the accelerating decline in ad revenue it's possible that this process could proceed much more rapidly. Getting an exclusive right to content from a dying industry is the definition of a bad business move.

chris100 17y ago
Circulation has been steeply dropping Yes and no. 10 years ago, at best I'd buy and read one newspaper per day. Now I probably visit 10 newspapers' websites per day to read various news. While physical circulation is down, overall exposure may not be.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  Yes, but do you BUY 10 newspapers a day? Hardly. Circulation is a source of revenue (currently a larger source of revenue for papers than online ads). Moreover, buying a physical paper encourages someone to spend more time with it, to read it thoroughly and to have greater exposure to the ads. Even today print ads are more valuable, per eyeball, than online ads. When you visit those 10 newspaper sites a day, how many ads do you click? How many ads do you even read? This is not to say that a paper couldn't survive with only online ad revenue, far from it. The key point is that the operations of those 10 newspapers whose sites you visit are no cheaper today than they were a decade ago. Most importantly, they are not cheap enough to be supported entirely by online ad revenue. And when you take away the print revenue and the circulation revenue, online ads are all that's left. You probably don't read the classified ads, the weather forecasts, the republications of identical national wire reports, or the beetle bailey cartoons at each and every one of those 10 newspapers. Yet each of those papers still puts out all of that material. And that costs money. It costs yet more money to arrange everything for a physical page and print tens or hundreds of thousands of physical copies of the paper every day. Papers could survive if they changed, but they don't want to change. Because if they concentrated on just the tiny fraction of work that they do that isn't redundant or unnecessary in the online world they would be much smaller operations than they are today. Not only that, but, odd as it sounds, not reprinting beetle bailey and all that other crap would cause them to lose a lot of subscribers in the short-term, even though it might be healthier in the long-term. So papers haven't changed much even while their industry has been radically transformed by technology. And most papers won't change much. It's questionable whether there exists a path between the way a given paper exists today and the sort of entity that could exist in the online world, it may be that it's easier to build something else from scratch. This deal with Microsoft is yet one more example of newspapers trying to avoid inevitable changes to their ways of doing business.

jpeterson 17y ago

This is yet more evidence that Microsoft still tragically misunderstands the web. How can they still be so far behind the curve? People don't search for news articles--they search for information (e.g. Wikipedia, local doctors, vendors, etc.) and for sites like Facebook (rather than typing out the URL). Colluding with a moribund print media industry will buy them nothing.