Sometimes my work with technology intersects with my love of politics and Daily Kos. This is just such a case. For months Murdoch's News Corp has been working on launching a paid site with content from across all their media properties. In an interview he has now said they'll hide the content from Google.
Some analysis and thoughts below the fold.
There used to be a saying in publishing that "Content Is King." To a large extent that is still true, but nobody wants to pay for it anymore. I mean I think most of us can recall the New York Times putting their op-eds behind a subscription firewall. How did that work out for them? Not so well.
It is just a fact in a digital online world, people are not used to paying for content. But of course good content is expensive to produce, so companies even in '09 all think they can find a better approach and they'll find a way to "monetize" their content were everybody else in the industry has failed.
Cue Murdoch:
Rupert Murdoch has suggested that News Corporation is likely to make its content unfindable to users on Google when it launches its paid content strategy.
When Murdoch and other senior News Corp lieutenants have criticised aggregators such as Google for taking a free ride on its content, commentators have questioned why the company doesn’t simply make its content invisible to search engines.
Using the robots.txt protocol on a site indicates to automated web spiders such as Google’s not to index that particular page or to serve up links to it in users’ search results.
Murdoch claimed that readers who randomly reach a page via search have little value to advertisers. Asked by Sky News political editor David Speers why News hasn’t therefore made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: "I think we will."
Now I feel his pain about aggregators like Google News or what the Huffington Post does, which is just pull in content created by the wire services. In fact one of the things I love about this site is they produce their own front page content and don't just "steal" it from a wire service.
But Murdoch is just crazy here. "Readers who randomly reach a page via search have little value to advertisers." I don't like Murrdoch much, but he does know how to make money and I can respect that. But this just shows a total lack of understanding about how the Internet works.
I can't wait for Murdoch to spend tens of millions on this new site, tens of millions more on marketing, and have it all explode in his face. That is going to be fun to watch.
UPDATE: LaurenMonica posted this link in the comments I had not seen. "Google: Rupert Murdoch can block us if he wants to."