Rupert Murdoch is mad. Not mad like The Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, but mad like pissed off about stuff.
Rupert Murdoch is considering blocking Google from The Wall Street Journal and other News Corp web sites
Search engine spiders index content of the sites owned by his company, News Corp, including The Wall Street Journal. Sure, when people click on the stories, News Corp has the opportunity to sell them advertising. And sure, The Wall Street Journal online is subscription only ($2 a week) so even people that find that story through a search engine like Google can’t read the whole text without paying. But don’t tell that to Murdoch. To him, they’re stealing.
“The people who just simply pick up everything and run with it, and steal our stories – they just take them without payment. That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com – a whole lot of people,” Murdoch told Sky News earlier this month.
Of course, it’s easy to tell Google and other search engines to stop indexing your site by putting some instructions in the robots.txt file on your server. And Murdoch has threatened to do just that. But what about the loss in traffic?
Google is often the number one source of traffic to a website. Heck, even the WorkSmart SmartBlog gets 50 percent of its traffic from Google. Most people and businesses WANT Google crawling their pages. That leads to more people visiting their site and (hopefully) increased revenue through product or advertising sales. Or just that warm, fuzzy feeling in your tummy that someone actually cares about your Twilight Fan Blog.
If The Wall Street Journal cuts off Google, won’t it lose revenue?
Hitwise says that 26 percent of The Wall Street Journal’s traffic comes from Google search and Google News. Business Insider says that getting rid of that traffic would cost the WSJ 10-15 percent of its revenue, or $10-$15 million. How would the WSJ make up for that $10-$15 million loss?
Rumors says Steve Ballmer may offer News Corp money to block Google's spiders and be listed exclusively on Bing
Enter Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on a shiny, white horse. (I know, scary thought) What if Microsoft PAID News Corp to block Google’s spiders and have their pages indexed exclusively by Bing? Sound crazy? The New York Times is reporting that there are talks between the two companies to do just that.
I’m all for this deal because I think it makes for interesting headlines in Internetland. Plus, I don’t read The Wall Street Journal, so what do I care? In the beginning, this move wouldn’t have much effect anywhere:
- Millions of people aren’t going to start leaving Google just because they don’t index the WSJ
- The Wall Street Journal wouldn’t see a big change in revenue because Microsoft would be essentially paying them for the loss of traffic from Google
- Bing isn’t going to see an influx of millions of searchers just because they index the WSJ (if you care that much about what The Wall Street Journal has to say, wouldn’t you just go directly there?)
- A couple of million bucks isn’t a lot in the eyes of Microsoft when it comes to promoting its search engine
I’m more curious as to the long term effects of this deal. Will other content companies follow suit? People won’t stop using Google just because The Wall Street Journal isn’t there, but they might stop using Google if a lot of other content started dropping off the search engine.
Would this lead to a bidding war to see who can sign exclusivity deals with all the other content providers? In this scenario, the web ends up fractured across multiple search engines. Will you have to do the same search on multiple sites to really find what you’re looking for? Will there be new search engines that search search engines? A search engine aggregator?
What if the opposite happened and instead of search engines paying content providers, they started requiring publishers to pay them to be indexed? Imagine if Google demanded a “listing fee”. If you don’t pay, Google doesn’t index your site.
Also, the Google spiders are just playing nice when they see a robots.txt file that tells them not to index a site. They don’t HAVE to obey that file if they don’t want to. There’s no law (yet). But what if push comes to shove and Google decides to go against its own motto of “Don’t be Evil”. Luckily for us, robots never disobey their masters…
In the end, it’s Rupert’s company and he should be able to set policies as he wishes. But in this case, I think he’s trying to move against the progression of technology and that’s probably not a battle he’s going to emerge on the victorious side of. Even with Steve Ballmer on a pony.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This is silly. It would be so much more productive if Murdoch simply focused on monetizing the potential 100,000 clicks per minute that Google can send his way.
It is more than 20 years and we havent seen a paid email service as yet. We havent seen paid subscriptions of RSS feeds as well. The challenge Rupert faces is not google, but how to establish a billing relationship with customers.