Murdoch Vs. Google: None can win, netizens will loose

Thu Nov 12 00:00:00 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch has diagnosed search engines like Google with "content kleptomania". Murdoch, who is Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, said In a recent interview that he is considering banning Google from listing his company's contents when News Corp. starts charging online readers in June next year. This rhetoric is not new from Mr. Murdoch, who owns behemoth like, "The Wall Street Journal", "New York Post" and the printing house "HarperCollins" but this time he sounds to be more serious.

Point of Contention:

Google indexes published content of News Corp for its search engine and other Google services like "Google News". Point of contention - the adverts which Google shows on the right hand side of search results. Google earns revenue from such adverts. Murdoch's content plays an important role in Google search results and news, but googlers do not fit into his new subscription based business model. So logically, it makes sense for Murdoch to ask for money from Google or turn off the digital tap. Though traffic from Google generates advertisement revenue for News Corp. but that is not good enough, as per Murdoch.

Google has already released a public notification, saying, they will be glad to remove News Corps. sites from its indexes and have also listed the steps by which News Corp can do the honor itself. This kind off standoff between Media mogul and Internet Maharaja is not healthy, and for netizens it is real bad.

Netizens: The Biggest Loosers

National Geographic, ESPN, Fox News, WSJ, New York Post and more than 30 other print and published media houses are in Murdoch's kitty, and they do generate quality content. If online content of these entities goes paid, we have to shell out money for reading this content. To make it worse, published content will not even be searchable from search engines. Either we have to choose WSJ's inbuilt search engines or miss out on the content. I will prefer the later, unfortunately.

Rupert Murdoch is not the only odd guy, Associated Press' Chief executive; Tom Curley is another one. Like Murdoch, he also believes putting a cap on the news aggregators like Google News . According to him, their stories are circulated around the world by news aggregator websites without respecting the copyright laws. He has also upped his ante against bloggers, YouTube, social networking and book marking sites that according to him have become "preferred destination for breaking news" and "takes charge of their content, without permission". For me such a statement is a bummer. But as suggestion, I will tell Tom Curley to lobby for making Television telecast audio less. So, no Blogger would have heard Rupert Murdoch making that statement on the TV, and Tom Curley can himself break the news during quarterly earning season of AP.

News Corp. has not learnt any lesson from Peer2Peer networking. Unreasonable barriers of higher pricing and closed doors only brighten black market avenues (More...). News Corp. has full right on his content and can block search engines but engines which ignore their lawful and technical commands will be even easier to make. Weirdest thing would be WSJ corpus available to download as a torrent. News Corp. should rethink their position, millions of articles published on the web have references and track backs to their content.

News Corp: Loosing all the way

News Corp. cannot ban Google alone, if the Google has to go, so will be other search engines (as per unfair/biased/anti competitive/ monopoly etc.. laws). WSJ as per Alexa earns its 11-12% traffic from search engines. Losing such traffic will surely affect the online visibility of WSJ. Loss of online visibility while trying to sell online subscriptions does not seem to be the smartest move. Perhaps, Mr. Murdoch should have waited for some time till the subscriptions picked up.

News Corp also owns MySpace; it has an advertisement deal with Google, and was suppose to bring 900 million dollars in advertising revenue. Deal has fallen short of expectations because of falling advertising rates and secondly, Myspace has lost its top slot to Facebook. This could have triggered the "Murdoch Vs. Google" series. Unfortunately, Murdoch might loose even more money with this hostile move.

Google : The long run looser

Simple query in Google "site:online.wsj.com", showed 2 millions indexed pages from one sub domain of WSJ. WSJ alone has tens of millions of web pages indexed. Alexa gives WSJ, 84th in USA and 327th worldwide website ranking. One can safely imagine the possibility of WSJ's result appearing in every 50th search query fired from USA. Absence of this index is not good for web searchers and Google, both. Worst for Google, who actually is lobbying with Governments around the world to open up the digital archives (non-sensitive) for indexing, as an initiative to open up the deep web.

If, News Corp. crack a deal with Google, 1000's of other content providers will also raise their heads. Reuters, BBC or TimesofIndia, all will have genuine reasons to ask for more in their own backyards. This in turn will raise the advertising cost or force Google to charge for web searches.

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I hope Google and News Corp. will act in the interest of everyone including netizens, there is no point of raising walls where others have failed.

Posted at 12:00AM Nov 12, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[0]