
Rupert Murdoch and Google Part 2 - stakent
http://blogmaverick.com/2009/11/10/rupert-murdoch-and-google-part-2/
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JCThoughtscream
Vastly underplays the downside, I feel. The worst-case scenario isn't that
News Corps sees that it's a bad idea after a few weeks or months of
experimenting with a Google-free world - the worst-case scenario is that
common sense wins out for once, the loss of Google indexing kills off
readership, News Corps companies are brutally battered by sudden obsolescence
/and their competitors fill in the void/.

It takes, what, two weeks to instill a habit? How long will Murdoch stubbornly
refuse to give grounds on the issue?

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trapper
Thing is, newspapers are _already_ taking a battering.

1) Sticking with the status quo is obviously changing their business for the
worse.

2) No one in the entire world has solved the huge reducing revenue problem for
content producers, so we can't say there is a better way for sure yet.

3) The web seems to have a short memory. It's all about now, not about then.
If they change back, I don't see much changing for them.

I personally think that sticking everything behind a registration wall with no
external indexing, while selling ads to go alongside their content _should_ be
a better model.

It's essentially what facebook does, and it seems to be working for them.
Google is great for the user, but not for the content owner used to large
revenues for said content.

Edit: Thinking about it, google really do "own" the worlds content; they
monetize it for extremely little effort on their behalf. I love this, and so
do you, but from a content producers point of view it's horrible. They used to
be in control of distribution & now have to give a significant portion of the
revenues they once had to a company who merely index the information, or
others that make near-automated efforts to aggregate it. The only way they can
_possibly_ get back that revenue is to wall the garden.

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Angostura
I really don't see why they don't wall the garden, but leave a window for the
spider to see into the garden.

Let Google index it and advertise it. Let readers see the adverts and pay for
the full content.

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rg
I pay for a subscription to Murdoch's WSJ, and get a paper copy delivered
every morning as well as online access (cost is huge, $400/year). Even so, I
read most WSJ stories because I find them linked from Google News where I have
lots of special news-search sections defined. I just don't have the time to
page through 75 sheets of paper every day (as I did twenty years ago), or poke
randomly around the WSJ's very slow and poorly-organized web site (vastly
inferior to NYT). If Murdoch's WSJ disappears from Google News, it will
disappear from my world and very likely I'd just end my subscription. More
subtly, when the WSJ writes about me (very occasionally), most of the value to
me comes when their story is chosen to be placed outside their paywall and can
be linked freely; if WSJ stories become uniformly inaccessible, there will be
little incentive for sources to cooperate with WSJ reporters and columnists.

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motters
As soon as I see a paywall, either on a news site or an academic site, I just
go elsewhere. Murdoch might enjoy a short term boost in profit if he forces
readers to a paywall, but longer term he's just making his content irrelevant
to most internet users (which is just about everybody these days) and so would
lose media mindshare.

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etherealG
uh, sounds to me like you have the upside and the downside mixed up there.
Them not taking control of the news market by realising they have already lost
it sounds like an up to me.

I'd rather have the power of where people find information in the hands of a
company that responds to popular opinion than one that responds to the US
government at will.

