Rupert Murdoch to Block Google = Smart = Twitter has changed it all.

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/11/09/rupert-murdoch-to-block-google-smart-twitter-has-changed-it-all/

by Anon84 • 17 years ago

21 28 17 years ago

blogmaverick.com

toddh• 17 years ago

What will Murdoch do when Twitter hijacks the links?

senko• 17 years ago

Twitter references bring pageviews, while Google News brings .. nothing?

I doubt (have no proof though, would be interested in numbers) that a considerable percentage of visits to a news site is from search engines. One data point: I don't remember when I last googled my way into a news article.

onewland2• 17 years ago

You probably haven't intentionally done it, but let's say you're looking for information on the arrest of Bernard Madoff or the Lehman bankruptcy:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS345US...

While it's true that I probably wouldn't search for "xyz Wall Street Journal article" I might be searching for xyz topic and happen upon a result in the WSJ

SlyShy2• 17 years ago

Right, because you couldn't have users both post news stories on Twitter and have the pages be indexed by Google. That's simply not possible.

endtime3• 17 years ago

The point is that he doesn't make money from Google's indexing of his content. Did you even read the article?

SlyShy2• 17 years ago

I rather did read the article. If you can get traffic from Twitter, why would you cut off getting traffic from Google?

"he doesn't make money from Google's indexing of his content"

How does he make money from Twitter users posting his content? The only way he makes money from Twitter is traffic, and Google also drives traffic. Therefore how does it make sense to cut off a source of traffic?

mustpax• 17 years ago

Ok, as clueless as he is, not even Mark Cuban can believe Twitter and Facebook live updates are going to supplant search engines. They serve completely different purposes. Traffic from each source is almost completely independent of the other. The traffic you lose from Google News might be made up by Twitter, but it is never going to make up for the loss of Google organic search results.

It is also ironic how each news outlet is so enthusiastic about their competitors blocking Google. They know they would just get their competitor's traffic for free.

This jumping on the Rupert Murdoch saber-rattling bandwagon is getting old really quick. I will believe the viability of their alternative business models when I see one of these media moguls actually block Google in their robots.txt file.

onewland2• 17 years ago

It makes me wonder: Does he even talk to people outside the tech industry? 90% of people I know that aren't in software/technology think that Twitter is a retarded fad. While I don't agree with that, they have an enormous amount of credibility building to do within the non-technical community.

I don't care if CNN or Fox News reads tweets during their "news" broadcasts. Twitter already has a retention problem, and Walter J. McTraditionalbusinessman isn't signing up for a Twitter account because Rupert Murdoch won't let Google index his results. He'll just search Google, and not find the WSJ's articles.

edit: To be fair, you don't need to be a twitter user to view public tweets. I do think, however, there is a general skepticism about the service that won't end soon in the business world.

endtime3• 17 years ago

>Ok, as clueless as he is, not even Mark Cuban can believe Twitter and Facebook live updates are going to supplant search engines.

He wasn't suggesting that! Just that Twitter is already a better source than Google for real-time news...not a very new or controversial statement.

stingraycharles• 17 years ago

His point basically is that, compared to Twitter, Google is unimportant for News Corp, traffic-wise. Which I personally find hard to believe.

enjo• 17 years ago

It would be rather controversial for me. Twitter search (at least on twitters site) is rather unsophisticated in the way it determines relevance. You have to wade through a pile of retweets to find anything truly useful.

Google news (or other sites like oneriot) do a great job of parsing through ALL of the available news outlets on a pretty quick basis. At the end of the day you end up in the same place (tweets are nothing but pointers to 'real' content in most cases), but I find it's much more efficient to utilize a more sophisticated search tool.

Put me squarely in the camp that the value of twitter is nothing more than ego stoking.

fjabre• 17 years ago

I've heard it a million times and for hopefully the last time: FB/Twitter will not replace Google. As much as the social networking fundies would love to see that happen.

This is a huge blunder on Murdoch's part - as if Fox was reporting news in the first place. Good riddens.

minalecs• 17 years ago

I think this guy misses Rupert's point entirely. Rupert doesn't want the random people that are coming from search engines, or twitter to use his sites. He wants the people that click on his news sites everyday to pay a subscription.

And yes the writer highly over values the importance of twitter. Twitter is good for trends, but to lead users to specific links or sites, like a search engine does based on popularity or relevancy.. is not the same. When a event occurs unless you're one of the first new sites to break it, you'll get thousands of news sites links with the same content.

teyc• 17 years ago

No, both of you miss the point. Rupert wants an audience. That is why he bought myspace. He talks about loyalty, but no so much that people are loyal to the newspaper, but he wants someone to stay on his properties the same way that when you buy a newspaper, you'd pour through every page. By simply making content premium, cognitively the reader is going to value the content more, thus making the reader stay longer. You see this with biz opp ebooks etc. Most information is freely available elsewhere, but the ones that get read are the ones people actually paid something for.

Tichy• 17 years ago

This makes me feel so tired. Why not just wait and see how it plays out in the long run.

fburnaby• 17 years ago

What makes me feel tired is reading words in ALL CAPS LOCK; this isn't the year 1999, or 2004. Heck, it's not even 2008...

CamperBob2• 17 years ago

"The concept of “If the news is important, it will find me” works better by the day. If it matters to me, chances are very good its in one of the twitter feeds I follow."

As with most people who use the Internet primarily to reinforce their own worldview, Mark Cuban must have the intellectual curiosity of a card-carrying dittohead. He and Murdoch deserve each other.

CamperBob2• 17 years ago

Note, before downvoting further, that those aren't my words: I was quoting Cuban. :-P

hyperbovine• 17 years ago

  TWITTER POSSES NO THREAT

If you have to rant, don't SHOUT. And if you have to SHOUT, spell it right.

richardw• 17 years ago

Hmm. Call me when Twitter is sending most sites more traffic than Google. Heck, call me when it sends 10% as much.

butterfi2• 17 years ago

hmm indeed! :-)

butterfi2• 17 years ago

hmm... delist my content from Google and instead rely on a company with no business model and that crashes frequently...

hmm....

pkulak• 17 years ago

Eh. People who read sites like his aren't searching for news, they're searching for their current views to be reenforced. Google news isn't good for that anyway (though Twitter can be). Might as well cut off the accidental readership.

jsz0• 17 years ago

The point that both Cuban and Murdoch are missing I think is the shelf life of news content isn't limited to only breaking news. For example I check a particular news site everyday but maybe 30 or 40% of the content interests me right now. I may be interested in the other 60-70% later but how am I going to find it without Google? I'm obviously not going to individually search a bunch of sites. That's why search engines exist in the first place -- no one wants to do that.

steve_mobs• 17 years ago

real time news is just a preference. The market segment for that preference and for people who know how to get real time news from the various tools is still very small.There are still millions of other people who prefer the old way that google caters to.

News corp getting rid of google and using facebook and twitter instead to drive traffic is dumb.They will block out millions of internet users in the process.

The only thing I agree with about marks blog is that twitter and facebook are not threats because they do not compete with newscorp news properties in the destination site space.

10ren• 17 years ago

One thing that struck me about twitter is that the mainstream media pushed it (e.g. Oprah). That never happened with Google.

I got the sense that the mainstream media felt that they could work with Twitter, and so of course they promoted it like crazy. This article suggests one reason why that might be: it's not a competitor to media, but more like the word of mouth that mainstream media is accustomed to handling.

Whereas Google solved a problem (of endless masses of information of unknown relevance) that had never existed before. It solved a geek problem, not a mainstream problem.

Rupert Murdoch to Block Google = Smart = Twitter has changed it all.

Related Stories