Nov
22
Rupert Murdoch: The man who might teach Google a lesson in humility
November 22, 2009 |
Rupert Murdoch has threatened to pull the content of his newspapers from Google’s search engines. The results could be paradigm-shattering.
Here are some things to think about. Web only accounts for 10 percent of the revenue at many print newspapers. And only a fraction of local readers visit a newspaper site through Google. (Most readers type the name of the home page in their browsers or have it bookmarked, or use an RSS feed.) Murdoch has little to lose by bailing out of Google, because the site is responsible for a minute fraction of News Corporation’s revenue.
On the other hand, Google stands to lose substantially. Every time readers search for news results on Google, they see advertising alongside the articles that Murdoch’s newspapers and others have provided for free. New-economy types argue that traffic and links are valuable, as opposed to information. But if other newspapers follow Murdoch and pull their news articles from Google, people will have to link and search for something else. The question is whether that something else will interest people as intensely and regularly as today’s news.
The showdown will force the central questions that have dogged newspapers for a decade and a half: If information is valueless, why are they paying so much money to produce it, and why is everyone but them profiting from the information they put on the internet? In the aftermath, look for for newspapers that publish a separate web edition, funded only by the revenue that comes in through the Web site–a formula that answers techies by adapting to the supposedly “new” economics of the Web, but also satisfies bottom-line-watchers by not forcing the print edition to subsidize Google.
The upshot is that whether newspapers stay or go, citizen journalists will be busy, because either outcome somehow results in a paucity of local news somewhere and someone has to provide it.
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.