Murdoch: We’ll probably remove our sites from Google’s index

http://mumbrella.com.au/murdoch-well-probably-remove-our-sites-from-googles-index-11366

by mjfern • 17 years ago

51 61 17 years ago

mumbrella.com.au

macmac• 17 years ago

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

pbhjpbhj2• 17 years ago

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.

petervandijck• 17 years ago

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

DanielStraight2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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

DanielStraight2• 17 years ago

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?

_pius• 17 years ago

I look forward to it.

biznerd• 17 years ago

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-...

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• 17 years ago

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/

swombat• 17 years ago

Hahahahahahaha

hahahahahahaha

hahahahahahahahahaha...

pauses

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha

klon2• 17 years ago

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

pxlpshr4• 17 years ago

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.

camccann2• 17 years ago

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?

Tichy3• 17 years ago

"viable and sustainable revenue models"

I don't know, but some blogs (like TechCrunch) seem to be doing fine. Maybe the big news outlets just need to find a way to operate more economical, so that they can survive off online ads?

klon2• 17 years ago

I was making a remark regarding dropping his content from Google. Wouldn't you say one of the important aspects in new media is getting your content visible to search engines in order to monetize it?

tomjen22• 17 years ago

The best solution would be to produce content nobody else has - but that means doing real journalism (which has not happened since Watergate).

I won't pay a penny to a newspaper to read about Britney.

ig1• 17 years ago

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.

tomjen22• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

clistctrl• 17 years ago

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.

RyanMcGreal3• 17 years ago

>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• 17 years ago

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.

Tichy3• 17 years ago

Unless you count ads on TV, I suppose.

henrikschroder• 17 years ago

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.

megamark16• 17 years ago

I think you're absolutely right, and it would be interesting (though impossible) to see this same thing happen with piracy and music industry. If there were a way to stop piracy and see how much the music industry sales dropped (assuming that they would), I wonder if they would get the picture.

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure the same outcome will hold. I would expect this to produce fewer views of Murdoch's sites, but I would expect the demise of piracy to produce more sales, because I don't think TPB and similar sites function mainly as search engines, and I think that distinction is important. Now, if YouTube were to be stopped (and all similar sites), I would expect that to hurt music sales in an analogous way to removing sites from Google.

NathanKP2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

pablohoffman• 17 years ago

I bet the guy didn't mention YouTube just to avoid giving competitors "free publicity". Just another example of how fixated his mind is on legacy business/marketing practices...

albertsun• 17 years ago

I doubt the content aggregator will lose much of anything by this happening. What this will be a test of is how dependent content sites are on aggregators, or if there are enough alternate ways for them to attract traffic that they don't need any specific aggregator (Google).

And if the other traffic sources are better at delivering higher value traffic, then they may even gain from it.

timf• 17 years ago

Could be a bargaining chip or a referral fee play? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=931647

j_baker• 17 years ago

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

rms2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

rms2• 17 years ago

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.

metatronscube• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

> 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.

SlyShy• 17 years ago

I hope he includes MySpace.

eleitl• 17 years ago

It's his funeral.

pbhjpbhj2• 17 years ago

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

randallsquared2• 17 years ago

Well, the press would be terrible. ;)

Concours• 17 years ago

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.

albertcardona• 17 years ago

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

elblanco• 17 years ago

Good. Hurry it up then, I enjoy schadenfreude.

synnik• 17 years ago

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.

NathanKP2• 17 years ago

I can attest to this from my own personal website building experience. I have found that random people are much more likely to click on ads. Amazon product ads are very effective with random search engine users.

amalcon• 17 years ago

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

stanleydrew• 17 years ago

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?

timothychung• 17 years ago

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.

jong• 17 years ago

Good riddance.

Murdoch: We’ll probably remove our sites from Google’s index

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