Why News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch is not a senile old man
Number of pages, or bits of content from News Corp owned web properties indexed in Google’s main search index as of 9pm EST, Monday, November 15 2009.
1. From Myspace.com – about 181,000,000
2. From americanidol.com – about 744,000
3. From AskMen.com – about 159,000
4. From Fox.com – about 83,300
5. From FoxSports.com – about 594,000
6. From GameSpy.com – about 824,000
7. From Hulu.com – about 225,000
8. From DrownedInSound.com – about 235,000
9. From PhotoBucket.com – about 77,500,000
10. From RottenTomatoes.com – about 3,990,000
11. From Scout.com – about 978,000
12. From SpringWidgets.com – about 45,200
13. From WhatIfSports.com – about 40,300
14. From WSJ.com (The Wall Street Journal) – about 939,000
15. From Sky.com (Sky News) – about 1,250,000
16. From TheSun.co.uk – about 1,120,000
17. From TimesOnline.co.uk – about 1,540,000
18. From NYPost.com (The New York Post) – about 457,000
19. From MarketWatch.com – about 1,140,000
20. From Barrons.com – about 411,000
21. From NationalGeographic.com – about 171,000
And that’s just a small sampling of the amount of News Corp content indexed in Google.
Imagine if or when all those high profile sites and content suddenly disappears from Google. Millions of people will be bewildered that they can no longer find anything from MySpace, the Wall Street Journal, Fox Sports, Sky News, National Geographic, the New York Post, PhotoBucket, Hulu, etc., etc. Users will have to either:
A. Stay loyal to Google and no longer be able to easily find the content they once happily consumed.
B. Move over to an alternate search engine, like Bing.com (who would no doubt jump at the chance to exclusively serve them that content in exchange for millions of new users and ad revenue).
C. Pay News Corp a small subscription or user fees to get the content they crave.
Many will pay, which will offset the lost ad revenue News Corp properties gained from the free google traffic. But most will move over to Bing.com where they’ll still be able to get most of, or all of what they got from Google.
How does Murdoch and News Corp benefit? By shoving aside the biggest search engine on the web, he now eliminates the competition for views of his content for the other search players. They now have a very compelling reason to actually pay to index News Corp content because Murdoch is offering them a chunk of the market share once dominated by Google. Murdoch makes the cash by selling that market share, and so does the new search engine that gets exclusive access to something they can offer current and new users who are loyal to News Corp brands, without the competition from Google.
The implications of the above are staggering, but what’s even more staggering is what Jason Calacanis talks about in the video below. Will other large content and media publishers follow suit?
Is this the beginning of an upset in the balance of power in search?
Murdoch doesn’t care about bloggers ranting that he may or may not be an idiot. He doesn’t care that by removing his content from Google will make way for their content to show higher in search results. He doesn’t care. He has the leverage to sell something that was once free because he’s now creating his own demand and fulfilling that demand at the same time. He’s a business man. Most bloggers are not.
List of News Corp web properties from Wikipedia.org
Pieces of content in Google – Google.com
By Paul on 16/11/2009
Like the post above? Share it with your friends!
Additional comments powered by BackType