

News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps - bdfh42
http://www.cringely.com/2009/11/news-corp-to-offer-plaid-stamps/

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jacquesm
Essentially Murdoch is arguing against gravity.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_foraging>

Is a nice explanation, if you give people powerful tools they'll use the past
of 'least cost' to get what they need.

If that path bypasses all your carefully created obstructions that allow you
to monetize the traffic then that's a real problem.

Imagine the owners of a free themepark that have a toll road to their
themepark, and you have to use it. Along the toll road are large billboards,
lots of them.

Then one day some guy invents a teleportation device that allows people to zap
straight in to the heart of your themepark, and back out again with 0 effort.

Just like water with a bit of help from gravity will find the path of least
resistance, so do your users.

The solution, is to make it even easier to find the content that users are
looking for, and to make sure that that is a way that is monetizable.

Blocking out google is going to simply drive all those users elsewhere, it
will be to them as though Murdochs sites no longer exist. And that may
actually be a good thing.

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andrewljohnson
This is very solid logic... for the same reason, ice cream vendors clump
together in NYC. You go where the action is... you don't create the action.

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unalone
Unless you've got a unique selling proposition, that is. Murdoch doesn't.

A magazine like Cook's or the Economist can charge for access, because they
offer writing that's leagues beyond the norm. The Wall Street Journal, on the
other hand, is a _good_ paper, by it offers nothing that I can't find
elsewhere. It's certainly not a Top 5 news source for me. So people likely
won't notice if the WSJ disappears from Google.

Murdoch is smart, one of the brightest men alive, but here for the first time
in decades he's met a system smarter than he is. On a level playing field he's
a shark, but he is no longer a holder of a primary source of power. I forget
who wrote yesterday that the Internet isn't about content, it's about access
nodes, but they were spot-on. Murdoch can crush wtb content, but he doesn't
own nodes and he doesn't understand them.

