Rupert Murdoch wants off Google; exclusive to Bing?

[Gerry]

Get ready to pay for news.

Some sites are already charging a fee per subscription to many of their news/newspaper/magazine sites.

Now it appears Rupert Murdoch wants his empire exclusive to Microsoft/Bing.

Yup, he thinks he is going to stop Google's search engine from crawling his publications sites and news.

News Corp.'s Talks with Microsoft: A Flawed Deal?
Confining content from The Wall Street Journal and other News Corp.
publications to Microsoft's Bing will do more to hurt Rupert Murdoch than Google

Even an alliance with the mighty Microsoft may not help Rupert Murdoch's media empire loosen Google's grip on the news. In an effort to keep News Corp.'s (NWS) newspaper content out of Google's search results, Murdoch's media giant has held early-stage talks to forge a deal that would put content from The Wall Street Journal, and possibly other company-owned publications, exclusively in Microsoft's Bing search engine, a person familiar with the talks says. The discussions come amid Murdoch's mounting frustration that Google (GOOG) benefits at the expense of his own media outlets when Web users search for news online. But analysts and antitrust experts say the move will do more to hurt Murdoch than Google.

 

[pjb2u]

it gets worse dosent it *sigh*

 

[axeman]

This is SOOOOO Rupert Murdoch, overpay for assets like he did for MySpace and WSJ, cry poor, and then try and charge readers to view his propoganda dressed up as news.

Im sure Google are just shaking in their boots!

They (at Google) are constantly going on about quality content, looks like Murdoch just kicked an own goal for them.

 

[whitebark]

Someone should explain to Murdumb how google news works. If he doesn't want the extra traffic then he should have his webmasters nocache, noindex every single page on his websites...

 

[Gerry]

Someone should explain to Murdumb how google news works. If he doesn't want the extra traffic then he should have his webmasters nocache, noindex every single page on his websites...

Precisely what the outcome will be...limiting traffic, declining revenue, declining readership, and an eventual giving in to google.

Of course, only after millions are lost and people loose their jobs.

 

[hugegrowth]

Brilliant - take all your sites off the world's biggest search engine.

News sites better find a way to make it without having paying subscribers - someone else will come along and just provide the same news for free. You can only charge subscribers if you are offering something unique - general news is everywhere these days.

 

[petrosc]

lol... this sounds stupid, why does he want google to stop crawling his sites?

 

[jasdon11]

Sounds like he's getting his accountants to advise him on the best way to run his online business.

 

[Gerry]

lol... this sounds stupid, why does he want google to stop crawling his sites?

All of this stems from the ongoing fight over newspapers demise, people turning to the web, and google search results turning up the news without having people go to the source of the news.

In other words, google is giving the news for free and most newspaper orgs think google should pay the newspapers a fee.

It is a failed attempt to keep physical newspapers alive. If that does not work, then many newspapers want to charge their subscribers a fee to get their news.

 

[olebean]

At an academic conference there was indication of change to the way internet users search the internet.. If that is the case, it might be a sensible to retain ditigal rights...

 

[axeman]

My advice to Murdoch is just buy google and try charge us all 10 cents a search.

Then we can all migrate to Bing, where it's free.

 

[denny007]

he thinks he is going to stop Google's search engine from crawling his publications sites and news

If he really wanted he could simply put one simple line into robots.txt

 

[HarveyJ]

Actually, if you look around in the tech papers, it seems some of MS's people have been having high level talks with Murdoch directly, and have offered him money for exclusive listings in Bing.
If that's the case, more people, particularly those in the financial sector (i.e. people that actually DO pay for "reliable" information) will probably switch over to it instead.

In some ways it's a smart move.
In others, it's just really stupid.

As for news being free, it shouldn't be. It costs money to host and research and filter.
But likewise, it shows a massive failure on their part to understand how to make money from current audience trends, which is pathetically sad as they could get the basic information they needed to start with from an intellectual black hole like Digital Point.

 

[dmyre]

This is SOOOOO Rupert Murdoch, overpay for assets like he did for MySpace...

Didn't Murdoch secure an advertising contract within 6 months of purchasing MySpace that exceeded his purchase price?

 

[axeman]

Didn't Murdoch secure an advertising contract within 6 months of purchasing MySpace that exceeded his purchase price?

Im uncertain if that is the case, but what i do know is Facebook soon became the "in" site.

He did however without doubt massivly overpay for WSJ, that is well documented.

 

[Gerry]

Murdoch is pretty shrewd in many business aspects.

And he'll want to see a return on those investments.

I am just not sure he is going to get all these search engines to cooperate with him and see his line of thinking.

The speed and spread of Twitter is enough to convince most that content is not held closely (private) nor is it likely to stay as a subscription service. Anything behind a veil of fees or supposedly private will be posted. Imagine, one person subscribes to the service and then posts all the content. Sharp teenage kids are able to do this undetected.