The position put by News Corp a couple of weeks ago that it may pull access to its content from search engines like Google is gaining traction. Read what Robert MacMillan has published overnight at his MediaFile blog at Reuters. He has moved from being a skeptic to seeing possible sense in the idea.
The debate is fascinating as newspapers struggle to find ways to monetise content online as they have done in print with classified advertising. Once they achieve this and can deliver content through a game changing device line the iPod was for music, the scale tips for online and away from the more expensive print.
The debate is even more interesting as Australian newsagents contemplate what the future of newspapers may be for them.
Rob entertains the thought that “Google traffic is not worth very much”. While this may be true in terms of the direct revenue it brings, in terms of its worth as pure traffic numbers its value is huge.
Murdoch still lives in a world where the brands of his publications are valued by consumers. This is far less the case on the internet. Why then would he envisage that people will switch their preferred search engine because News Corp isn’t searchable from their existing provider? If people can’t access News Corp from Google the vast majority simply won’t notice or won’t care. Other online publishers will simply fill Google’s search results, leaving News Corp to fend from the scraps provided by Bing.
While the idea may be sustainable for News Corp’s smaller and niche publications, its larger mass market brands are not likely to survive. And that in itself negates the argument which would only work if a majority of news publishers removed their sites from Google’s index – something that is incredibly unlikely.
And that doesn’t even take into account the legal issues surrounding search engine indexing.
It would be great if all those dinosaurs removed their content from Google. It would hasten their demise and provide more opportunities for new media companies to replace them.