Murdoch’s Google Gambit
By ERIC ETHERIDGEOn Sunday, the day before the 20th anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall, Rupert Murdoch appeared in an interview on Sky News in Australia, and promised to erect pay walls around all his company’s Web sites and then block Google from searching and linking to them.
This is not the first shot across the Internet’s bow that Murdoch has fired, and a few old hands are growing a bit tired of these warnings. “Sheesh,” writes John Battelle, “Just give Google summary text and headlines to index (like the W.S.J. does now).”
Then do your best to convert would be readers to your paid model. That’s it. What’s the big deal?
The rest is bluster.
Others are still hoping that Murdoch actually delivers the Final Showdown. This could be “the search / engine newspaper standstill we’ve all been waiting for,” writes Simon Owens at his site, Bloggasm. “There are many who think this would be suicide, but if it is it would be suicide in the name of answering the question we’ve always asked: Can a newspaper survive without Google?”
Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing doesn’t think a big faceoff is likely. His reasoning? Murdoch is “lying” about blocking Google.
[H]ere’s what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he’s still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).
So what he’s hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you’ve never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year’s operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.
He may, in fact, get a taker. And it will be a disaster. A search engine whose sole competitive advantage is “We have Rupert Murdoch’s pages!” will not attract any substantial traffic. The search engine will either go bust or fail to renew the deal. . . .
So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet, hoping that the world’s politics and economies will reform themselves to suit your fevered imaginings. This is how history will remember you.
Mark Cuban agrees that Murdoch is thinking different, but in a good way.
Cuban is also enjoying the frenzy Murdoch has stirred with his latest comments: “Rupert Murdoch has said that his Newscorp sites are going to block Google indexes. Of course, all the netizens freak out when this happens. Which I love.”
I love to tweak all the internet information must be free bigots. They get so damn religious about information on the net that they lose what little objectivity and awareness of the real world they had in the first place. First a little enlightenment for all of you that think Murdoch is making a mistake. This is not 1999, nor is it 2004, nor is it 2006, nor is it 2008. The calendar is about to turn to 2010. What worked and made sense 3, 5 and 10 years ago, no longer does.
What has changed? Quite a bit, but lets start with this. TWITTER IS SURPASSING GOOGLE as a destination for finding information on breaking and recent news of all types. Whats more, TWITTER POSSES NO THREAT to any destination news site. 140 characters does not a story make. Find it on twitter, link to a story on say, FoxNews and everyone is happy. The same concept applies to Facebook Links. Twitter and Facebook are not news destinations that can compete with traditional news sources. Google is. Rupert loves him some twitter. Google, not so much.
Not only are Twitter and Facebook becoming strong competitors for referrals to news sources from topical searches, they both have one HUGE HUGE HUGE advantage for news outlets that Google does not:
TWITTER AND FACEBOOK are platforms that allow the news sources, like newscorp to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not. In other words, if I trust a newspaper, tv or any brand, I can follow it on twitter and expect the news to come to me. The concept of “If the news is important, it will find me” works better by the day. If it matters to me, chances are very good its in one of the twitter feeds I follow.
Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008. . . .
News sites blocking Google ain’t what it used to be. Rupert is right. Deal with it.
In response, Mike Masnick at Techdirt says he’s “a big believer in the idea that ‘earned media’ or ‘earned links’ are increasingly important online.”
That’s the idea that growing numbers of people are relying on news links that are being passed to them via friends on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It’s about recognizing that more and more often news stories “find people” rather than the other way around. That is, people are increasingly getting links from friends, acquaintances and colleagues, rather than going searching for the news. And those “earned” links or “passed links” are quite valuable because friends are more likely to trust and pay attention to what is personally sent to them, rather than what’s just on the front page of a news site.
That said, Masnick doesn’t buy the rest of Cuban’s argument.
Cuban says that it’s all about this recognition that such earned links are becoming so important these days, and Murdoch realizes that links from Twitter and Facebook are growing in value, whereas links from Google have little value. To be honest, I’d be surprised if Murdoch had thought through it that carefully, but more to the point, I’m not sure I believe the full premise. Yes, those links are valuable, but they need to start somewhere, and one of the ways they start is from news junkies using aggregators like Google News to find the news and start passing them around. Blocking that starting process makes little sense. On top of that, even when I’m passed a link, I’ll often use Google News or other sites to dig deeper. Taking News Corp. sites out of the picture doesn’t help at all. And, finally, while I keep hearing about sites getting so much more traffic from such passed links these days, I can say with authority that on Techdirt, they’re still a tiny fraction of the traffic we get from Google.
So, yes, directly passed links from friends or colleagues are valuable and important, but it’s a part of a wider ecosystem of news sharing that Google News and other aggregators are most certainly a large part of. Saying that blocking Google News makes sense because of things like Twitter and Facebook ignores how Google News plays into those links even being on Twitter and Facebook.
On Twitter, Steve Rhodes pointed out what he sees as another problem with the now-that-we-have-Twitter-we-don’t-need-Google position. “The problem is people will be much less likely to post a @wsj or other news corp link @twitter or facebook which is behind pay wall.”
Matthew Ingram seconds Rhodes point, and says the pay wall issue is “one which publishers ignore at their peril.”
Readers online may not pay you directly with currency, but they pay you with their time and attention (the foundation of the so-called “attention economy”) and it’s in your interest to make things as easy for them as possible — which is just one strike amongst many against pay walls. And if Mark Cuban is right (which I think he is) about social recommendations becoming increasingly important as a way to find valuable content, what happens when someone shares a link to your pay-walled content?
What happens is a potential reader runs headfirst into that wall, or has to jump through all sorts of hoops to read it . . . and that is a significant disincentive to a) read anything further, or b) share any links themselves. It’s the classic cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face problem: you try to generate incremental revenue through restricted access, but by doing so you deprive your content of even more valuable re-distribution through recommendation networks, which in the long run reduces your traffic and thus your revenue.
At the Daily Beast, Douglas Rushkoff argues that Murdoch’s strategy is about more than the pay wall: “What Murdoch understands is that a revolt against the free will take more than erecting a subscriber login between a Google link and a story.”
All the login does is push the user to find an alternative source for the information — some other publication’s free link. No, what Murdoch has realized is that a newspaper is not just valuable for the individual stories or tidbits that can be culled, piecemeal, from a generic list. A newspaper provides context. It tells a story through its selection of articles for a given day, their juxtaposition, and even their flow over time.
By opening themselves up to immediate vivisection-by-search, news organizations invite the disconnection of their articles from their context and their source. And the more they encourage their content to be parsed in this way, the more they encourage readers to look at the work of their journalists as mere datapoints, isolated from a greater perspective. Like what ringtones are to music.
When Rupert Murdoch first bought The Wall Street Journal, one of the few major newspapers charging readers for access, he suggested that he would soon remove the tollbooth in order to promote bigger readership and more ad views. Now, just a couple of years later, he is realizing that The Journal had it right, and ultimately protected the integrity of itself as a publication by keeping itself intact.
Rushkoff’s analysis is somewhat similar to Michael Wolff, who speculates today “What if, in fact, [Murdoch] actually knows what he’s doing?”
What if he doesn’t want to build an online business? What if his war with the Internet is of a much more fundamental nature? What if he wants his papers (that is, his wood pulp papers) to last, well, as long as he lasts?
It actually may be easier to get people inclined to buy his papers to buy them in wood pulp form than it is to get them to pay a subscription fee online. It actually may be more economical to have nobody come to his websites, for nobody to expect him to have a website, than to have to keep up the cursed programming of ever-cooler bells and whistles. Rupert may not know from Google, but he does know the truth that publishers have always known: Better to have no readers than readers who cost you more than you make on them.
Old-fashioned publishers, and there is no publisher more old fashioned than Rupert, are good at simple math. If you can only get a few more people to buy your paper, if you can just stop your circulation from falling as fast s it’s been falling, you can stay in business a while longer.
The Internet is going to put all of them out of business, but why help it?
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