

Badda Bing: Microsoft woos newspapers by funding their stick to beat Google - azharcs
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2009/11/13/badda-bing-microsoft-woos-newspapers-by-funding-their-stick-to-beat-google/

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jpeterson
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.

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steveitis
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.

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baguasquirrel
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.

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ax0n
Otherwise known as prolonging the death of an industry that refuses to
innovate. How appropriate.

~~~
papa
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.

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InclinedPlane
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.

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chris100
_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
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.

~~~
chris100
_When you visit those 10 newspaper sites a day, how many ads do you click?_

And how many ads did I click on when I was reading the paper version of a
newspaper or magazine?

[One of] The great downfall of newspapers is that now each action can be
precisely measured. We know exactly what our instant return on investment is.

I was one who looked at our company's advertising budget, looked at the return
(number of clicks), and said to cut it in half because we could put that money
to better use somewhere else.

I know the pain because I had many meetings with editors and people selling ad
space in magazines who were desperate to get our advertising budget, to the
point where the editor would offer to let us guest write articles...

And then a good reason why I stopped reading those magazines in the first
place is the poor quality of the articles. No wonder, if they are just repeats
of press releases, I don't need to read that.

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mcantor
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.

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

