

Murdoch Making News Invisible To Search Engines? Not So Fast - fiaz
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-video-murdoch-making-news-invisible-to-search-engines-not-so-fast/

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branden
Okay, that makes a lot more sense.

The author's conclusion, supported by the statement's context, is that viewers
referred by search engines will get a paragraph and a subscription nag. It's
certainly more reasonable than removing his sites from search indexes
entirely.

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eli
So that means Google is only going to index the first paragraph of the story?
(Otherwise it would violate Google's rule against showing different content to
the GoogleBot versus visitors)

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jrockway
I doubt Google's rules apply to News Corp.

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eli
Why do you say that? I'm pretty confident Google News would still be the #1
news site, even if they completely delisted all news corp sites.

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ajb
Google already makes quite a few exceptions from this rule: journal articles,
for example, show up in search results, but you get to a paywall if you click
on them.

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michaelcampbell
The guy is definitely smart, but I think his hubris here is almost
embarrassing. Don't want to wish bad on anyone, and I hope he gets what he
wants, but I suspect he's not "getting it" here.

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hegemonicon
What's he not getting? The current method of news distribution, where papers
put their content up for free on the web and continue to take punishing losses
isn't sustainable. From what I understand, online advertising alone simply
won't cover the cost of running a newsroom - some sort of pay model is
inevitable.

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wglb
But what happens if people don't want to pay?

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tokenadult
_But what happens if people don't want to pay?_

Not everyone wants to pay today. The people who do pay have access to much
more content, by subscription, than the people who only read what is free.
That's a distinction that could survive for a long time--paying customers
having access to content from charging providers, and everyone having access
to content from free providers.

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njharman
> The people who do pay have access to much more content, by subscription,
> than the people who only read what is free.

The amount of free content not behind a NewsCorp paywall far far exceeds the
amount that is. This will hold true after every NewsCorp property is
subscription only.

