Posted on 11/09/2009 12:01:24 PM PST by Mr. K
News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch has suggested the company's online newspaper pages will be invisible to Google users when it launches its new paid content strategy. He claimed that readers who randomly reach a page via an internet search hold little value to advertisers.
When asked by Sky News Australia's political editor David Speers why News Corp has not stopped Google from finding its content, Mr Murdoch replied: "I think we will."
He cited the Wall Street Journal as an example of where only the first paragraph comes up on search engines and is free. Anything after that is subscription-based.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sky.com ...
So give a better one. Yahoo?
Any suggestions? I use ask.com or bing.
‘new paid content strategy’
Lol. I wonder how long that will last.
Btw, ‘More reason to change your default search engine from Google’
Why?
Google News is just a open source collector, its Murdoch not wanting to play ball.
It is easy enough to block Google’s spiders from crawling a website.
I switched to Bing from Google as my primary search engine months ago and it works just fine. I avoid Google as much as I can.
I’ve successfully completed the switch to Bing even though I wouldn’t call myself a big fan of MicroSoft.
Well, he means that he is going to block all of the search engines as he doesn’t think very many of the readers find the sites via search engines.
He’s nuts, of course.
There have been articles on this in the past. Eventually all of the internet will be subscription based.
Even if the search engines didn’t pick up News Corp sites, if you knew the URL you could just type it in, right?
This will be a big mistake for News Corp because there many other free alternatives to it.
Free Republic has all the news anyone could ever need. It also has the best user comments and analysis of events.
Currently, if you go through Google (or seem to), you get to see the whole article even if you are not a subscriber. Just type refcontrol
into Google and scan the helpful suggestions that show up below the text box.
Prince Rupert wants those hits wherever he can get them. If he puts up his wall, folks will get their news somewhere else.
Their “paid for” strategy is very bad move whereas Foxnews is concerned. He needs to remember who made them # 1.
I’ve never figured out why media companies allow Google to link to their news stories. There’s no value-added for them. Murdoch’s right - people who look up news stories via search engines are worthless bandwidth hogs who add no value to advertisers on those news sites. And I write as one of those bandwidth hogs.
Good luck with that strategy.
Here are the top affiliations of Obama contributors, according to Open Secrets:
University of California $1,591,395 Goldman Sachs $994,795 Harvard University $854,747 Microsoft Corp $833,617 Google Inc $803,436 Citigroup Inc $701,290 JPMorgan Chase & Co $695,132 Time Warner $590,084 Sidley Austin LLP $588,598 Stanford University $586,557 National Amusements Inc $551,683 UBS AG $543,219 Wilmerhale Llp $542,618 Skadden, Arps et al $530,839 IBM Corp $528,822 Columbia University $528,302 Morgan Stanley $514,881 General Electric $499,130 US Government $494,820 Latham & Watkins $493,835
This isn't about Google blocking News Corp. It's about News Corp blocking Google and all other search engines.
Personally, I don't quite get how blocking some readers just because they came to the site from a search engine helps Murdoch's bottom line. FreeRepublic is searchable on Google. I'm sure that more than a few FReepers have found their way here as a result of a Google search.
It's simple. The web is driven by search engines. If folks can find what they are looking for via a search engine, they are not going to bother visiting umteen media sites that all index their content in different ways and with varying degrees of effectiveness. Sites that keep their content off search engines had better have very special content, for which a small number of subscribers will pay high prices, or they will starve. Even if they have a subscription wall up, it's still better to let the search engines in, if only so that non-subscribers will see what they're missing.
Murdoch’s right - people who look up news stories via search engines are worthless bandwidth hogs who add no value to advertisers on those news sites.
Murdoch's wrong. I rarely click on ads, yet Google still thrives on ad revenue. Media sites would be smart to tailor the ads shown next to an article based on both the article content and the keywords used to reach it (available in the referrer string).
The odd thing is that WSJ currently does just the opposite. Visitors from Google are privileged, not shut out. See my post #12 above.
FreeRepublic is searchable on Google. I'm sure that more than a few FReepers have found their way here as a result of a Google search.
Try typing this query into Google and see what comes up:
"good luck with that strategy" google bing opensecrets
Google has gotten really fast at keeping up with FreeRepublic. When I tried the above with Bing (after trying it on Google), I got zilch. So, either Bing discriminates against FR, or it has a mojo deficit. Not being prone to conspiracy theories, I lean towards the latter.
I have been amazed at how quickly Google indexes new material on FreeRepublic.
“University of California - $1,591,395.”
How can a university the received state and federal funds endorse a candidate? Could you of you freepers from CA please do some investigative work on this area and report back on this thread? Why should a public university be allowed to act any differently than a nonprofit 501(c)3?
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/budget/?page_id=5
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