Murdoch Finally Loses It.
I think Rupert Murdoch is losing his mind:
So, Murdoch thinks the way forward is to remove all links from Google and to have links to his content exclusively on Bing, the Microsoft search engine which no-one has ever heard of.Microsoft has been in early discussions with the News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, about a pact to pay the News Corporation to remove links to its news content from Google’s search engine and display them exclusively on Bing, from Microsoft, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke anonymously because of the confidential negotiations.
If such an arrangement came to pass, it would be a watershed moment in the history of the Internet, and set off a fierce debate over the future of content online.
That's a plan. It's a terrible one, but it's a plan.
All Murdoch is doing here is cutting himself further out of the picture. The notion that people would use one search engine simply to access Murdoch's content is borderline insanity.
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4 comments:
The deeper question, for those of us who make our living in the news or publishing industry, is how else to survive than to limit access and charge for access?
I understand the dilemma C, but I think Murdoch is going the wrong way with this. If the product is good then I read it online, from which I take it they earn advertising revenue, and then I also buy The Independent every day because there will be articles that I find in the print issue that I could never locate online. The same is true for Time, Vanity Fair and a few other publications; none of which belong to Murdoch.
The entire political blogosphere would come to an end if we had to pay for access to every publication which we link to or reference.
Murdoch's problem overall is that he is producing a lot of tat, it has nothing to do with internet access.
I hate to say this, but the cat's out of the bag, the horses are out of the barn, the genie's out of the bottle. It's too late. The news media with the free access is the one that everyone will read, because the free one is the one who everyone will follow the links to, and links are the lifeblood of the internet.
I suppose every major news provider could get together and agree to charge for content, but that sounds an awful lot like a cartel or something to me. Let's face it, this is that old devil "free enterprise" that people like Murdoch are always harping about being so superior. Unless, it seems, it's costing him money.
As for the loss of newspaper revenue, a far larger culprit than the internet is the massive leveraged debt that has been incurred by newspaper conglomerates as they used borrowed money to build their empires in an ill-timed attempt to corner the information (and so therefore the power) market. Too bad, so sad, and as usual, working folks who do all the work get hurt the most. But rig the system in favor of assholes like Murdoch so that working stiffs at the bottom dont lose their jobs? No thanks, especially since it'll be relatively futile anyway in the profit-before-news environment spawned by the corporatization of the industry.
I hate to say this, but the cat's out of the bag, the horses are out of the barn, the genie's out of the bottle. It's too late. The news media with the free access is the one that everyone will read, because the free one is the one who everyone will follow the links to, and links are the lifeblood of the internet.
I agree, Dave. I think Murdoch is in for a hiding here. He's going against the whole ethos of the internet.
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