In the recent past, Rupert Murdoch, controller of News Corp, had announced that he could potentially take all of News Corp’s content off of Google’s search engines. Now he has gone one step ahead by entering into talks with Microsoft for exclusive search rights.
News Corp owns a number of newspapers around the world including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Sun and The Times of London. The first reports about talks between Microsoft and News Corp pointed toward Microsoft paying millions to News Corp for exclusive search rights. Neither party however has made a formal statement to the press.
Murdoch has repeatedly expressed his displeasure about people accessing news content free on the web. With the traditional newspaper industry slowly moving toward its demise, Murdoch seems to be trying to hedge the same fate for its online version. He states that the consumer should pay for receiving quality reporting from its newspapers.
The actual act of taking its content off of Google isn’t very complicated. They simply need to include a robots.txt file on the website which instructs Google’s crawler to not index its pages. However the more important question is how wise is Murdoch’s move.
To help get a clearer picture of the consequences we look at a few numbers. Google has been responsible for almost 25% of Wall Street Journal’s traffic. This is higher than any other source that drives traffic to its site. Removing its content from Google could potentially kill this section of their market.
The flip-side is that Microsoft is willing to pay millions to News Corp to index its sites. Since print and advertising revenue has been slumping big time, this could mean added short term revenue for News Corp. In the long term however, they risk becoming irrelevant in the news industry.
This is simply because Google dominates the search market at present. If users do not see news from WSJ or its other news sites on Google News, they will most likely just click on the next available source. And there are definitely going to be third party sources that simply plagiarize News Corp’s content and put them up on their sites. These sites in turn will get more traffic.
Google hasn’t been overly alarmed by this development. Matt Brittin, Google’s UK director had this to say “Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue.”
Whatever might be the outcome; this marks the aggressive plot that Microsoft seems to be using to attack Google. Steven Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, is fixated on beating Google at its own game.