Come On People, The NewsCorp Announcement Isn't the End of Google
It was with much brouhaha today Rupert Murdoch explained that he was going to pull NewsCorp from the Google search spiders. This of course is interesting, but I hardly think that it spells the end of Google and I believe that the impact on NewsCorp will be significantly more negative.
The general sense is easy to comprehend, NewsCorp owns the content. Google is spidering it and sending people there for free. Obviously, NewsCorp is in business to make money, but wants to make more. Journalists at the Wall Street Journal aren't free.
So I get it, but I also get that Google drives more traffic than anyone on the planet right now and I'd suspect that it would be better to get that traffic than not, but what do I know. Since they didn't ask me, I'll offer my suggestion - offer 1/2 the article as a teaser and a micropayment for the remainder. This leads to the micropayment issue not being resolved, but hey, we are a race of short term thinkers.
I don't think that, in Jason Calacanis' view point, that this is the most important story of the year. Nor do I believe that this is going to impact Google in the least. I'm just guessing right now, but looking Compete, I only see 14M monthly unique visitors to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the Times. 14 million uniques. Google gets 145M uniques per month, which is where Jason probably got the 10%.
But I'd suggest that people that go to sites that are owned by News Corp, go there directly more often than not, and not through search. If I want to find out what is going on in San Jose, I don't go to Google and search for it, I've been trained over the past 15 years to go to MercuryNews. Likewise, if I'm looking for financial information (and want to get really good writing), I don't search for it, I go to Wall Street Journal. I'd guess I'm not alone in this.
Jason does paint a great picture of this playing out though, with Microsoft's Bing coming in to serve NewsCorp content as a premium:
So, for a moment, imagine a world where Bing could say in their TV commercials: “Want to search the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today and 3,894 other newspapers and magazine?” “Well, then don’t go to Google because they don’t have them!” “Go to Bing, home of quality content you can trust!”He also asks 3 pretty good questions about this rejection of Google and a potential partnership with Bing. Here they are with my answers: a) If 1,000 major publications pursued this strategy, would it work? The vast majority of the 1,000 major publications have completely missed the bus when it comes to online strategy. I have a really hard time believing that they could pull themselves out of their scotches and build a vision for this type of collusion and then execute on this. By the time that they are able to even see this happening, 50% of them will either be acquired or will have gone out of business. b) If you would only search the top 1,000 newspapers and magazines on Bing, would you use it? How often? No. I get my local news from 1 news source (Mercury News) mentioned above and I get my national news from CNN or WSJ, or NYTimes or something with a bit more credibility. Everything else comes from blogs and citizen journalism. At some point, the line between blogs and major news outlets will change, but that is a different story. c) What is the percentage chance this will happen (I need a #), and why? Less than 10%. First off, Rupert Murdoch views this as a competitive advantage. Other news outlets will see this as a similar strategy, but won't go the way of NewsCorp and may look for other outlets for their online distribution. Second, there is no way that the logistics of this could be managed. Getting 1,000 (or some other large number) organizations to work together is damn near impossible. Finally, I think that organizations would rather figure out a way to monetize their content more effectively based on Google sending traffic, rather than cut off their noses to spite their face. What do you think? Leave me a comment and tell me if I'm nuts or inline with this thinking. Here is the video to learn more:
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Who really cares about newspapers?
Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.
Seriously.
So the Rocky Mountain News, Denver's daily paper recently shut down. There has been a minor media storm recently around the idea of some large, stoic newspapers hitting financial hard times. It seems like it is only a matter of time before the SF Chronicle, the NYTimes or the Chicago Tribune is holding it's hand out for a bail out, hoping not to meet the fate of the Rocky Mountain News. A billion here, a billion there, why not save them. It's like super-sizing for a quarter.
But come on, news papers? First, lets start with model - delivering news to your door step several hours after it happens. It isn't news by that point any longer, it's olds. When the plane crashed in the Hudson, Twitter & Flickr were the news, not the SF Chronicle. By the next morning, when the paper came out, everything to be known about the crash was already known. It wasn't like they were breaking some major story.
Second, how many tons of paper or thrown into landfills each day. I'd love to see the study on this, but let's say that the Chronicle prints 1 million papers a day at a pound a piece (maybe a bit more on Sunday). You can do the math, but if you extrapolate that same number through the 50 largest cities in the US alone, you get pretty close to 1 billion pounds of paper being thrown away each month. That is a lot of dead trees and a lot of waste.
Journalism isn't dead. In fact, I'd say that by looking at the Technorati numbers, that journalism is in more demand than ever. I don't believe that print media is even close to dead. But the idea of delivering daily content, in a manner that is wasteful and dated is just plain stupid business.
Businesses come and businesses go. It is the beautiful part of capitalism. Got a great idea? Is there a market demand? Know how to execute on it? You might have a successful business. But if there is no demand (daily newspapers) or you can't execute (US automotive industry) then your business should go away. Don't bemoan the fact, simply adjust and thrive.
And yes, I will miss spending Sunday's doing the NY Times cross word puzzle with my wife, but I suspect someone will build a social crossword puzzle that we can do together by that point.
