
Murdoch: We’ll probably remove our sites from Google’s index - mjfern
http://mumbrella.com.au/murdoch-well-probably-remove-our-sites-from-googles-index-11366
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henrikschroder
I hope he carries through with this threat, because only actually doing it
will provide hard evidence on who loses the most on this type of action: the
content producer, or the content aggregator.

I think that News Corp will be the biggest loser, and I think it would be
really good if they got to learn this lesson the hard way, but I also think
the people in the blogosphere banging their chests and proclaiming the final
demise of Old Media are wrong, yet again.

~~~
NathanKP
_Only actually doing it will provide hard evidence on who loses the most on
this type of action: the content producer, or the content aggregator_

If I was a betting man I would put my money on Murdoch loosing money. This is
what happens when some CEO who doesn't know anything about how the web or how
search works goes on a rampage. I wonder if Murdoch even knows what a browser
is. (Reference to Google's "What is a browser?" video series.)

Edit:

I was just laughing while watching the video. Murdoch didn't even use
YouTube's name. He said "that, that huge video site that was such a runaway
success." What I get out of it is he's just jealous of Google. I bet he wants
to buy them out and add them to his portfolio.

~~~
defen
People said the same thing about the MySpace deal, and look how profitable
that turned out to be. I don't think you give Murdoch enough credit.

~~~
joe_the_user
Isn't MySpace supposed to be dying under News Corp? Tell me if I'm wrong.

~~~
cakesy
Myspace has been losing share, while facebook has been gaining a lot. If you
look at it that way, mySpace is losing. I am not sure how well it is
performing for Murdoch.

You have to give kudos for him trying to get into a new market.

As for how he will lose if he removes his sites from google, time will tell. I
assume he has done a lot of work looking at the area.

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ig1
What makes everyone think they haven't done a lifetime ROI analysis and
discovered that search referals aren't profitable ? - the only thing we have
is speculation. What Murdoch has is hard data about visitors and ad-click
through rates. I'm willing to bet they have a much better understanding of the
value of search referals than anyone here.

Going pay-only is a risky strategy, everyone knows that, but the only way
they'll know if it works if they do it. Business isn't always about accepting
the status quo, sometimes you have to gamble.

~~~
tomjen2
Sure you have to gamble, but the only way this will make money for Murdoch is
if makes less money on people who comes to his site from a search than it
costs to serve that page; unless he has gotten the worst bandwidth-deal of the
century.

~~~
ianferrel
That's not true. You can't compare one business strategy with _nothing_ and
conclude that it's a good strategy. You have to compare against the
alternatives.

If Newscorp has 10 million visitors per time period, and makes a net of $0.01
per visitor, that's better than nothing, but if they can go down to 1 million
visitors per time and net $0.15 per visitor, it's better. Murdoch seems to
think that they can do the latter. I don't have any data to refute him, and
neither, I'd guess, does anyone else in this thread.

It's possible that Murdoch is totally off his rocker, but it's usually a fair
baseline strategy to assume that the guy who runs a multi-billion dollar
company has a bit of business acumen.

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SlyShy
I hope he includes MySpace.

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_pius
I look forward to it.

~~~
biznerd
It's not in the bag yet

When Murdch originally bought the WSJ he said he would bring the pay walls
down on WSJ.com:

"(WSJ.com) is an excellent site but we charge for it, which limits it to about
a million in circulation. We are studying and we expect to make that free, and
instead of having a million, having 10 or 15 million people in every corner of
the earth keeping up to date minute by minute with all business and economic
news from around the world. We think that will attract very large sums or,
relatively large sums, anyway of advertising revenue."

[http://paidcontent.org/article/419-nws-dj-murdoch-we-
expect-...](http://paidcontent.org/article/419-nws-dj-murdoch-we-expect-
wsjcom-will-go-free-have-to-modernize-dj/)

I'm very curious to see what convinced him to do a complete 180. It was only
two years ago when he made that statement.

~~~
ironkeith
My guess would be a CPM somewhere around $0.15. It would appear that he was
correct regarding traffic though: <http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wsj.com/>

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metatronscube
I think this just may improve the quality of news on the internet! Hopefully
more independent news outlets with forward thinking mindsets can take
advantage of the reduced noise and actually start to put out material that
will be of a better quality. Perhaps we will start to see more journalism from
around the world with different points of view? more individual journalists
and blogs with relevant and accurate information for a change.

I for one hope he does go through with this!! I think its just going to end up
hurting his core business more...which is a good thing really. He is just
accelerating the demise of the paper/tabloid and big media as we know it.

I think a lot of people will have a different opinion, but I think this is
great news.

~~~
assemble
> journalism from around the world with different points of view

Journalism isn't supposed to have a point of view. It's supposed to give you
the facts and stay neutral.

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DanielStraight
Vaporplan? As far as I'm concerned, when a business leader says their company
might do something, it's as good as not saying anything at all. Even when they
say they _will_ do something, they often change their minds.

~~~
joezydeco
Unless he's trying to gauge what his advertisers will do after saying such a
thing in public.

~~~
DanielStraight
This is probably the reason, but if he can throw a thought out there just to
see what the response is without actually knowing he's going to follow
through, why wouldn't the advertisers do the same thing?

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synnik
His idea than random surfers are worthless to advertisers seems very odd to
me.

I'd think that the random surfers are MORE likely to click an ad. After all,
they aren't committed to your site -- They got there by accident. If a related
ad is there, it seems likely that they would follow it more readily than
someone who went to that site specifically to get their news.

~~~
amalcon
Not all ads are about the clicks. I'd expect NewsCorp's online properties to
be more concerned about impressions.

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stanleydrew
I'm confused about something. I thought newspapermen (Murdoch and that AP guy
in particular) had a problem with news aggregators, which to me means things
like Google News and Digg and HN, and maybe even RSS/Atom readers. Are they
actually mad about having links to content from Google results pages? Or is
there some misunderstanding here?

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rms
To understand Murdoch's motivations, you must realize that the man has a true
love for the printed word, especially in newsprint form. The only thing that
makes sense to me here is that he is intentionally sabotaging the internet to
make his beloved newspapers more appealing. It's not going to work, but bless
his heart for trying.

~~~
pavs
Are you serious?

This man runs his news(!) organizations to spread his personal ideologies as
opposed to actually providing news. The only thing he really cares about is
maximizing profit (nothing wrong with that), to say that his action was a
result of his love for printed media is pretty silly, really.

~~~
rms
Yes, I'm serious. Thanks for asking. And no, Murdoch is widely misunderstood.
Profit comes first, not his political ideologies. He basically supported
Barack Obama in the 2008 election.
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8220054890220213491> is interesting.

~~~
camccann
Speaking as someone who grew up surrounded by a Fox News target demographic
(religious conservatives), I'll also note that many of them _hated_ Fox's
entertainment programming for undermining family values through violence,
indecency, poor role models, and all the usual complaints directed at anything
edgier than "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood".

Murdoch's news outfits may be blatantly biased, and overlap his own ideology
to some substantial degree, but the primary goal is pandering to the
audience's sensibilities (read: profit), not promoting his politics. Step back
and think about it. Has commentary on Fox News ever convinced anyone to change
their mind?

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j_baker
One thing's for sure: this plan is so crazy it's either really smart or really
stupid. Only time will tell.

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timothychung
Why don't they negotiate with Google?

I don't see any point of trying to threaten Google. Just be a man, mate, the
Aussie way.

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macmac
Mr. Murdoch should consult his referes log before executing on that strategy.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Perhaps he has, in fact almost certainly. (btw sp: referers(sic), yes it's not
referrers!)

Some fictitious scenarios:

1) they give away the news, only ad revenue from 100% of current readers who
are mostly too cheap to pay (that's me!)

2) they sell the news to 5% of current readers, targetted ad revenue doesn't
alter as these readers buy stuff, and buy stuff online to boot

I'm going to go ahead and assume that most people come to the prestige
newspapers The Times (of London) by a search for the papers name - now they're
not going to delist themselves just stop putting all their stories up online.
Indeed I'd expect them to have lead summaries still in SERPs. If most paying
customers and most ad following customers come via the reputation and not
specific stories then it seems there's little to lose.

Even if it works but not as well as liked it's only going to work better if
more news centres follow suit - the less freely available well written news
online the greater the value of pay news (and the less they'll need to
charge).

Personally I think Murdoch can probably pull this off for some of his larger
news providers - do I like it, not one bit.

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klon
He showed just how incredibly oblivious he is to the workings of new media.

~~~
pxlpshr
Would you say many businesses in the new-media internet sector are equally
oblivious to _viable_ and _sustainable_ revenue models?

Seems to be a gross sense of entitlement amongst consumers if you ask me. It
kills off quality content providers in favor or knee-jerk social media and
mediocre content generated by algorithms to maximize SEO/SEM juju.

My point is, there are two sides to this coin and somewhere in between is a
happy medium. I don't feel either side has the best solution — yet.

~~~
camccann
_Seems to be a gross sense of entitlement amongst consumers if you ask me. It
kills off quality content providers in favor or knee-jerk social media and
mediocre content generated by algorithms to maximize SEO/SEM juju._

The situation you describe is what is generally known as "supply and demand".
If low-quality content is all that many people actually _want_ , the supply is
nearly inexhaustible and so the value of content does exactly what you'd
expect. There doubtless remains a smaller market for higher-quality content
who can be convinced to pay for it, but that's not the mainstream and probably
never will be--and while outfits like the WSJ and NYT may be the best of the
old mainstream stuff, they're still on the wrong side of the shifting market.

Most of the traditional media is in the unenviable situation of being neither
sufficiently high-quality to reach people who will pay, nor sufficiently cheap
to reach the new mass market. The only sense of entitlement going on is the
media companies bellyaching that the market has moved and left them behind.

Murdoch is a hack and doesn't have the cojones to provide _real_ quality, but
at his age he'll probably be dead before his mistakes fully catch up with News
Corp. In the meantime, if quality is what you're after, have you considered
buying a subscription to The Economist?

~~~
pxlpshr
Supply and demand is not the issue here. My point was about SEO/SEM in terms
of "gaming" the system AND producing low quality content.

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124173784714798437.html>

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petervandijck
That's so crazy it JUST might work! Nah, it won't.

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elblanco
Good. Hurry it up then, I enjoy schadenfreude.

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Concours
dito, it's really his funeral, I guess they won't really do it, he obviously
doesn't know what he's talking about, he'll find it out soon enought to change
his mind.

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jong
Good riddance.

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clistctrl
personally, I would be willing to pay for news content. However I do not want
to subscribe to NY Times, and wall street journal, and Forbes, etc I read
articles from all these sites on a daily basis but I would hate to have to pay
$100 a month in subscription fees... i wouldn't.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
>personally, I would be willing to pay for news content.

That makes you an exceptional case. Most North Americans haven't paid for news
content in well over a century. Since the advent of advertising-based
newspapers, we've paid for _distribution_ , but not the content itself.

~~~
m_eiman
I don't think the guy on the street buying a news paper thinks to himself
"good thing I had a dollar to pay someone for distributing all this free news
content to me", but rather "good thing I had a dollar to buy a news paper".

The economics behind the scenes may very well be that his dollar pays only for
printing and distribution, but that's not what people _think_ they're paying
for.

~~~
thwarted
It's not what people have actually paid for, it's what they think they've been
paying for. They think they've been getting news for a quarter or a dollar,
when their subscription price goes up because they arn't just paying for
distribution anymore, but rather all the things that advertising used to pay
for, will they not perceive that as an increase in the cost of the news?

~~~
RyanMcGreal
> It's not what people have actually paid for, it's what they think they've
> been paying for.

I would argue that the distinction is irrelevant in this case. If the news was
priced according to the cost of creating content tomorrow, the number of
buyers would be correspondingly smaller than it is today.

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albertcardona
Never underestimate the power of wishful thinking ... for shooting oneself in
the foot with a bazooka.

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eleitl
It's his funeral.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I somehow doubt even if one of Murdoch's papers went down he'd feel the pinch
at all.

~~~
randallsquared
Well, the press would be terrible. ;)

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swombat
Hahahahahahaha

hahahahahahaha

hahahahahahahahahaha...

 _pauses_

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha

